cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/16759425
Lithuania installed “dragon’s teeth” and mines in front of the bridge on the border with the Kaliningrad region
“This is a precautionary step to ensure more effective defense,” the Lithuanian Defense Ministry said on Twitter. The ministry explained that the Queen Louise Bridge is Russian property, so Lithuania cannot install “dragon’s teeth” and mines on the bridge itself, but only in front of it.
I don’t get the downvotes. Landmines are a huge issue. The balkan countries are still struggling with them 30 years after the wars. Cambodia, Vietnam, Iraq… every “theater” of war, where landmines have been used are, still struggling with them decades and decades more after. Ukraine too will suffer for decades.
If there is an inevitable military need for them, there is no alternative. But they should not be used lightly and i am fairly certain, that Lithuania is not doing so lightly either.
The big problem is, that for now the only reliable technique to remove landmines from an area is to dig up the area step by step. This is extremely costly and still dangerous, despite all effort in using robots, animals detecting the explosives and so on. So i hope Lithuania triple counted the mines they put and keeps that record very well.
The problem doesn’t really come from small fields like this. It’s when you hand them out by the truckload and tell every unit to go wild. Russia has had numerous cases where they didn’t even tell their own friendly units where the mines were, so I’d say that’s a much bigger issue than this little where the whole world knows about it.
The problem is a little more deeper than that - the very nature of mines is that they are indiscriminate. Whether you’re one force, another force, a civilian, or an animal - it does it’s job and goes boom without any further intervention by a human.
The remainder of your point is absolutely valid, but mines are a shit idea from the outset. Area denial is indeed a tactic, but alliances and boundaries change, and what was once a defensive line may be a suburban district in a hundred years time, until a future innocent party detonates one underfoot and is killed or severely maimed.
I thought mines were prohibited under the Geneva Suggestions, but perhaps there’s a loophole somewhere.
Well, if you don’t want a bridge to be used, you can either mine it, or tear it down. The latter is a lot more work, and you can’t exactly only tear down your half of it.
The Geneva convention is fine with landmines. The Ottawa treaty band anti-personel mines, but it does not ban anti-vehicle or anti-armor mines. The logic being that if you don’t set it off by stepping it, it’s not that big a risk.
Now, I’m not a mine expert, but these ones look WAY too big to be anything but antitank mines.
Landmines should be against the Geneva Convention.
Unfortunately, landmines are a small part of a large problem: unexploded munitions last centuries. Artillery, rockets, grenades, mines, explosives, even large ammo dumps can stick around and explode decades later.
Here’s an active one from WW1 that is still uninhabitable because of the danger:
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/red-zone/
Oh, I know. That’s why it would be great if we had at least the small step of landmines being considered a war crime. We’re obviously not going to get any country to totally give up on munitions.