Russian forces were planting landmines in cities, farming households and public transport stations “remotely by means of artillery, helicopters, multiple rocket launch systems and drones”, said Oleksandr Riabtsev. These “genocidal activities” had affected areas home to six million people, the Ukrainian defence official told a landmine conference in Cambodia’s Siem Reap.

It comes a week after Washington announced that it would supply anti-personnel landmines to Kyiv to help its forces battle Russian troops, a decision immediately criticised by human rights campaigners. The United States and Russia are not signatories to the anti-landmine convention.

Ukraine is a signatory of the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention and has committed to destroying its stockpile of landmines, but has previously missed deadlines. Another Ukrainian defence official told the conference Kyiv would not fulfil a pledge to destroy around six million landmines left over from the Soviet Union. The commitment made in connection with the convention’s Oslo Action Plan is “currently not possible” due to Russia’s invasion, Yevhenii Kivshyk said.

Arsenals and other sites where anti-personnel mines are stored “have been under constant air and missile strikes by the armed forces of the Russian Federation”, he said. “In addition, some of them are in the territories that are currently under occupation by the Russian armed forces,” Kivshyk said. Therefore there was “no possibility whatsoever to conduct audit and verification of the anti-personnel mine stocks”, he added. Kivshyk made no mention of the US offer to supply landmines to Ukraine.

Ukraine using the US mines would be in “blatant disregard for their obligations under the mine ban treaty”, said Tamar Gabelnick, director of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. “These weapons have no place in today’s warfare,” she told AFP. Ukrainians “have suffered long enough from the horrors of these weapons”.