LAUSANNE: Dozens of countries committed Thursday to help clear war-torn Ukraine of massive amounts of mines and explosives, which contaminate nearly a quarter of its territory.
During a two-day conference in Switzerland, more than 40 countries backed the Lausanne Call for Action, committing to concrete actions toward humanitarian demining in Ukraine, the organizers said.
“Ukraine has become the most mined country in the world,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal told the conference.
He said that since Russia’s February 2022 invasion “about a quarter” of Ukraine had become covered with mines and unexploded bombs.
“The scale of this challenge is truly massive,” he said.
“We are talking about an area of approximately 140,000 square kilometers — nearly three times of size of Switzerland.”
He pointed to expert estimates that “up to 9,000 civilians could lose their lives” if action is not taken to clear away the mines.
Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis stressed the urgency. “Without humanitarian demining, you do not have agricultural production, you cannot feed people, you cannot let children play, you cannot build industry,” he told a press conference.
Representatives promised on the first day of the Lausanne conference to help provide “swift and safe rehabilitation of agricultural areas,” according to a Swiss statement.
They also vowed to support “the economic and social reintegration of victims with disabilities” and “the promotion of international cooperation between the various partners active on the ground.”
They committed to supporting local manufacturing of demining tools in Ukraine, as well as exchanging experience and knowledge to foster “innovative methods and technologies that increase the effectiveness of mine action” globally.
The World Bank has estimated that demining Ukraine will cost around $37 billion — a figure Shmyhal said was “likely to grow.”
He stressed the need for more demining machines, pointing out that they in a single day could carry out the equivalent of 100 days of manual labor.
Since a first Ukraine demining conference was held in Croatia last year, Kyiv has seen its number of demining machines swell from 32 to nearly 100, Shmyhal said. Several times that number were needed, he added.
More than 40 countries vow land mine help to Ukraine
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More than 40 countries vow land mine help to Ukraine
- During a two-day conference in Switzerland, more than 40 countries backed the Lausanne Call for Action, committing to concrete actions toward humanitarian demining in Ukraine
- “Ukraine has become the most mined country in the world,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal told the conference
Trump takes unconventional approach to communicating to the public about war in Iran
- The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war
Typical of an unconventional presidency, the Trump administration waited more than 48 hours to make any live, public communication to the American people about why it had decided to go to war with Iran.
President Donald Trump discussed why he launched the attack prior to a White House ceremony honoring military heroes on Monday but took no questions from reporters. Earlier in the day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine briefed journalists at the Pentagon.
The two days previous, Trump delivered two pretaped statements that were released on Truth Social, the social media site owned by the president’s media company, and granted telephone interviews to more than a dozen journalists — several of which produced fragmented responses that, to some, clouded as much as they cleared up.
The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war, even as the American military suffered its first casualties. By contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has teamed with the US against Iran, delivered two statements the day the war began and addressed reporters Monday at the site of a missile attack that killed nine people. The Israeli military has held multiple press briefings each day.
“The American people need a commander in chief, and he has been absent in that role,” Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, said on CNN Monday. Emanuel, a Democrat, is contemplating a run for the presidency in 2028.
An unconventional strategy leads to criticism
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote on social media that “after Trump launched a new war on Iran, he did not rush back to the White House to make an Oval Office address to rally the nation as other presidents have done. He stayed at Mar-a-Lago to attend a glitzy political fundraiser.”
That post provoked a response from Steven Cheung, White House communications director. “Imagine being a reporter so consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome that he wants President Trump to mimic the failed policies of the past. The truth is that President Trump spent the majority of his time monitoring the situation in a secure facility, in constant contact with world leaders, and made multiple addresses to the nation that garnered hundreds of millions of views. He also took dozens of calls with reporters.”
The calls included one with Baker’s colleague at The Times, Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Trump’s mobile phone number is known to many of the reporters who cover him, and the president often takes their calls for on-the-spot interviews. Besides The Times, he spoke in the aftermath of the attack to journalists for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Axios, Politico and an Israeli television station.
Most of the calls were brief and marginally illuminating; Politico’s Dasha Burns said Trump answered but said he was too busy to talk. The public couldn’t hear what Trump said in the interviews and was dependent upon what the journalists chose to report on the conversations.
“I spoke to President Trump today and he told me that the operation in Iran is going to go very fast,” Libby Alon, a reporter for Channel 14 News in Israel, wrote about her interview on X. “It’s doing very well, and (will) make the people of Israel very happy, and the people of the world very happy.”
The Times reported that in its six-minute chat, Trump “offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.”
In one of his two conversations with Trump, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl said when he asked about the death of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the president said: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well I got him first.” CNN’s Jake Tapper went on the air minutes after his conversation Monday, saying Trump told him “the big one is coming soon,” an apparent reference to a future attack.
Asked for comment, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said: “President Trump is the most transparent and accessible president in American history. The American people have never had a more direct and authentic relationship with a president of the United States than they have with President Trump.”
Hegseth briefing concentrates on friendly reporters
Pentagon reporters learned late Sunday about Hegseth’s briefing. Reporters from The Associated Press, Reuters, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and Stars & Stripes were permitted into the briefing room, but Hegseth did not call on them. Instead, he took questions from NewsNation and Trump-friendly outlets like the Daily Caller, Daily Wire, One America News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. Most mainstream news outlets left their regular stations at the Pentagon last fall rather than agree to Hegseth’s rules restricting their work.
Hegseth denounced the “foolishness” of people wanting to know details of the operation in advance, such as whether Americans would commit to more than air power, and said the operation would continue as long as it took to achieve objections. He initially ignored NBC News’ Courtney Kube when she called out a question: “President Trump put a four-week time limit on it. Are you saying he’s wrong?”
Later, Hegseth denounced Kube for asking “the typical NBC sort of gotcha-type question. President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it might take — four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, it could move up, it could move back. We’re going to execute at his command the objectives he set out to achieve.”
Unlike Pentagon briefings in past administrations, reporters were given assigned seats, with the Trump-friendly outlets seated in front. Jennifer Griffin, Hegseth’s former colleague at Fox News Channel who left the Pentagon with other reporters after not accepting his new rules, was seated in the last row.
