One of the innovative approaches to demining the territory of Ukraine is to offer partners to patronise a specific area of work in this field. This was discussed during a meeting between Yuliia Svyrydenko, First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy of Ukraine, and Rachel Schiller, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Programs and Operations in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs (PM).

The meeting took place in the framework of the International Donors’ Conference on Humanitarian Demining in Ukraine on 11 October 2023 in Zagreb.

"We are committed to clearing the territory of our country of mines as soon as possible and returning the land to economic use. The scale of the problem is extraordinary – more than 170,000 hectares are potentially contaminated. To accelerate the clean-up, we need to look for, propose and implement innovative approaches. For example, we are working on creating and launching a highly competitive market for demining services – no one in the world has done this before. Another innovative approach we want to offer our partners is to patronise certain areas or sectors of work. We already have a good example: the UN World Food Programme (WFP), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the Fondation suisse de déminage (FSD) are implementing a joint project in Ukraine to demine smallholder land. We will develop and offer our partners ‘package’ areas, such as demining of critical infrastructure, power grids, forests, underwater demining, etc. We hope that the United States of America will participate in such cooperation,” said Yuliia Svyrydenko.

During the meeting, the parties agreed to discuss these ideas in more detail and in a substantive manner within the framework of the Sectoral Working Group on Humanitarian Demining.

To remind, the participants of the First International Donors’ Conference on Humanitarian Demining in Ukraine, which took place in Croatia, included representatives of more than 40 foreign countries – ministers of defence and foreign affairs, ambassadors and heads of foreign organisations. The Ukrainian delegation was led by Yuliia Svyrydenko, First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy of Ukraine.

As a result of the event, a number of countries announced support for humanitarian demining in Ukraine. In total, the support for demining and other war-related challenges, including the new aid packages announced at the Conference, amounts to almost half a billion euros.