Today, almost a quarter of Ukraine is potentially contaminated by landmines and other explosive remnants of war. This comes at an immense human cost: Ukraine has suffered more than 1,500 civilian casualties from landmines and unexploded ordnance since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, a figure that is likely to be an underestimate. For affected communities, the danger is not abstract. It exists in fields, forests, roadsides and the land around homes. Beyond posing a risk to human life, landmine contamination also stifles the country’s broader recovery. Large swathes of land – among the most fertile in Europe – simply cannot be used. Farmers cannot sow their crops, critical infrastructure cannot be repaired and investment cannot flow.
Everyone agrees demining matters. It saves lives, enables communities to return home and restores a basic sense of safety. But with some exceptions, it has too often been treated primarily as a humanitarian issue rather than an urgent economic priority. It is slow, technically demanding and mostly funded through fragmented and volatile humanitarian aid budgets.
Ukraine is changing that. Demining is no longer being framed largely as a humanitarian objective. Instead, it is increasingly being seen as the starting point for economic recovery and sustainable development.
This shift did not happen by accident. One of the central challenges Ukraine faced early on was that, while the urgency of demining was obvious, the economic case for it was not well quantified. Policymakers and donors could see the human cost, but it was harder to measure the macroeconomic consequences. Without that, it was difficult to elevate demining alongside the many other urgent wartime priorities competing for attention and funding.
At the request of the Ministry of Economy, the Tony Blair Institute worked with Ukrainian partners to build an economic model designed for decision-making, not simply academic analysis. The aim was to translate the impact of contamination into terms that government officials, donors and investors could act on.
This was not straightforward. Regional economic data after the full-scale invasion were incomplete, access to key government data sets was often constrained by institutional bottlenecks and the effects of landmine contamination had to be distinguished from the wider economic shock of the war. Working closely with government counterparts, humanitarian NGOs and technical partners, TBI overcame these data gaps, refined the methodology and ensured the analysis reflected realities on the ground.
The team ultimately developed a model at the oblast (regional) level, combining data on suspected and confirmed hazardous areas with indicators on GDP, exports and tax revenues, while accounting for factors such as conflict intensity, direct damage, chemical contamination and casualties. This allowed us to estimate the specific economic drag caused by contamination, rather than simply describe the broader economic consequences of war.
The results were striking. Our model, based on data up to 2023, estimated that landmine contamination costs Ukraine more than $11 billion in lost GDP each year, including billions in lost exports and tax revenues. What had previously been understood primarily as a humanitarian burden was now clearly visible as a macroeconomic one.
Just as importantly, the analysis reframed the cost of action. The World Bank estimates that fully clearing Ukraine’s land will cost tens of billions of dollars. But set against the scale of annual economic losses, that investment begins to look very different. In purely economic terms, demining starts to resemble a high-return public investment.
Once demining is understood as an economic imperative, it becomes what Ukrainian policymakers have described as “phase zero” of recovery – the condition that must be met before the country can rebuild in earnest. To help embed this understanding in policy and funding discussions, the report was deliberately shared with the audiences most able to act on it. We held a launch event attended by more than 150 senior stakeholders from government, the donor community and the mine-action sector, and used the findings to support wider public engagement, including through an op-ed by Tony Blair and Howard Buffett in The Economist. The analysis was also covered by international and Ukrainian media, including Reuters and DW, helping move the economic case for demining into a wider policy conversation.
Our analysis also addressed the global implications of landmine contamination in Ukraine. Before the full-scale invasion, Ukraine was one of the world’s most important agricultural exporters, feeding hundreds of millions of people globally. Much of that production came from precisely the regions now affected by landmine contamination. When those fields are taken out of production, the effects are not confined to Ukraine. They ripple through global markets, tightening supply, raising prices and hitting the most vulnerable countries hardest.
TBI used this connection to make the case that clearing Ukraine’s mines is not only about national recovery, but also about global food security. As Howard Buffett and Tony Blair argued in The Economist, clearing Ukraine’s mines is essential to restoring agricultural production and protecting vulnerable countries from the consequences of disrupted food supply. This framing matters too. It shifts demining in Ukraine from a domestic challenge to a shared international interest.
There are already signs that this new understanding is changing how the problem is approached. TBI’s analysis helped strengthen the evidence base for international support, contributing to the wider case for a €700 million commitment from the Lithuania-Iceland Demining Capability Coalition to Ukraine’s demining efforts. Conversations are also expanding between donors, international financial institutions, the mine-action sector and governments of mine-affected states about new financing instruments, including front-loaded funding models. There is also growing focus on speed and scale: how to move from traditional processes to innovative alternatives, supported by new technologies and artificial intelligence.
This is already visible in Ukraine, where demining teams are increasingly using drones, satellite imagery and AI tools to survey contaminated areas more quickly and target clearance where it is most urgently needed. These technologies do not replace the painstaking work of deminers on the ground, but they can make that work faster, safer and more efficient.
None of this diminishes the human impact of landmine contamination. Saving lives and enabling communities to return safely remains the primary purpose of demining. But by adding a clear economic lens, Ukraine has made it harder to deprioritise. It has placed demining at the heart of reconstruction policymaking.
In places such as Kharkiv oblast, the connection between clearance and recovery is especially clear. Demining is what allows farmers to return to their fields, repair crews to restore infrastructure and families to feel safe using roads, gardens and public spaces again. The economic case matters because it helps unlock the resources needed to make those ordinary acts of recovery possible.
The challenge ahead remains immense. At current rates, clearing all contaminated land could take decades. But the shift in framing has already changed the trajectory. Demining is no longer just about clearing land. It is about unlocking an economy, stabilising global food systems and accelerating recovery.
This is why the work matters. TBI helped make visible, in economic terms, something Ukrainians already understood in human terms: that recovery cannot begin properly while land remains unsafe. The hope is that our analysis will help unlock the funding, urgency and innovation needed to return land to productive use, restore livelihoods and enable Ukrainians to rebuild their lives with confidence.