From mines to toys in Ukraine

Ukrainian officials are also eager to cooperate. When the Red Army withdrew from Ukraine in the 1990s, it left behind huge stores of weapons, munitions, and equipment dating back to World War II and even World War I. Many of the explosives have become unstable and pose a danger to local populations.

In addition, several high-profile cases of Ukrainian weapons being sold on the black market - including allegations that arms went to Iraq - have increased concern about the security of Ukrainian arsenals.

"There is significant danger that, if large arsenals of weapons are left lying around in this country, they will be sold to unfriendly countries or terrorists," says Mykola Siruk, editor of the Ukrainian journal Defense Express. "I don't blame Western governments for worrying. It is not difficult to sell these weapons. The Ukrainian Army is in crisis, and there is total chaos around the arsenals."

The mines-to-toys project is a key element in efforts to demilitarize Ukraine and transform the cumbersome military-industrial complex it inherited from the USSR. At the end of the Soviet era, armaments and other military industries accounted for 25 to 35 percent of the Ukrainian economy. After a decade of economic collapse and budgetary crisis, Ukraine's armed forces have been cut by two-thirds and military enterprises account for less than 5 percent of economic production.

"Military industries have been forced to drastically adapt to the times," says Nikolay Sungurovsky, a military analyst for the nongovernmental Ukrainian Center for Economic and Policy Studies. "The government doesn't have resources to pour into a huge military industry and the once guaranteed Soviet market disappeared almost overnight. This has forced many factories to close, and others have had to learn to make something else."

Besides the mines-to-toys project, other examples include a factory in central Ukraine that is developing a system to make safer industrial explosives out of solid rocket fuel, and a group of farmers in western Ukraine who last year converted tanks from a local military factory into tractors. While those tractors still resemble tanks, the Donetsk toys look nothing like the mine cases they once were.

"It is fitting that we make toys out of the mines," says Yelena Kazakova, who has worked at the plant for 15 years. "Land mines are a horrible weapon because they kill mainly non-combatants, many of them children. I think all land mines in the world should be destroyed, and I hope we can make a good start on that."

Ukraine has 6.4 million antipersonnel mines, the fourth-largest stockpile in the world after China, Russia, and the United States. The Ukrainian government recently signed the International Land Mine Ban, which, once it is ratified by Parliament, will compel the country to dispose of its stockpiles. That alone should keep the workers at the Donetsk plant busy for quite some time.

"We would be happy to destroy land mines from other countries," says chief engineer Grigory Volodchenko. "We want to work and we are good at what we do.... Perhaps someday we will be allowed to dismantle Russian or even American mines."

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