Three adults were killed and three children wounded when an anti-personnel mine exploded under their car on a road in the Chernigiv region north of Kyiv, Ukraine’s ombudsman said Tuesday.
The adults died on the spot while the children were taken to nearby hospitals with injuries of varying severity.
It is believed to be the first time during the current fighting that civilians have been killed by a mine, ombudsman Lyudmyla Denisova told AFP.
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She said in a statement on the Telegram messaging service that the area of road they were travelling on near the village of Kolychivka had been covered with straw and rubbish to disguise the mines.
The mines were placed by Russian troops, she added.
Anti-personnel mines are sensitive enough to be triggered by people on foot, not just by vehicles, although the Ukrainians were in a car.
Denisova did not give details on how the mine was identified.
The rights official stressed that using anti-personnel mines against civilians is barred under international law.
A UN treaty agreed in Ottawa in 1997, which went into force two years later, banned anti-personnel mines. Ukraine signed the deal, but Russia and the United States did not.
Ukraine has been classed by international organizations as one of the countries with the largest amount of mines and other explosive devices contaminating its land, due to their use in the separatist conflict in the country’s east that began in 2014.
In 2018, three children died and one was injured in a landmine blast while playing in an abandoned house in rebel-held east Ukraine.
The International Campaign to Ban Landmines and Cluster Munition Coalition last month said it “strongly condemned” the use of both types of weaponry in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and called for “an immediate end to their use.”
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