Russia’s Armored Mine-Clearers Can Blast Entire Streets. They’ve Done It Before.

If Russian President Vladimir Putin pulls the proverbial trigger and the Russian army currently massed along the border with Ukraine rolls west toward Kiev, the fighting could be bloody, confusing and chaotic.

Perhaps the most nightmare-inducing weapon, for the attackers, are landmines — powerful explosives lurking just beneath the soil, silent and unseen until you step on them or roll over them in your vehicle.

It’s not clear how many landmines seed the ground along the likeliest invasion front in eastern Ukraine’s separatist-controlled Donbas region. But it undoubtedly is a lot. To deal with mines, the Russian army deploys specialized units riding in equally specialized vehicles packing powerful countermeasures.

One of these countermeasures has a secondary role—wantonly blowing up entire city streets.

The Russian army like many modern armies deploys line charges as its primary mine-clearing system. A line charge essentially is a rocket-propelled, rope-like explosive. The rocket boosts the charge into the air, draping the line charge across the minefield. The idea is for the subsequent explosion to trigger any mines underneath, explosively clearing a path.

The trick is to get the mine-clearing line charge, or “MICLIC,” close enough to the minefield—usually no more than a few hundred feet. There might be enemy gunners or missileers behind that minefield you’re trying to clear, and they undoubtedly would love to put a few rounds in a vehicle hauling a ton of naked explosives.

It’s not for no reason that the Russian often mount their MICLICs on armored vehicles and fold them into combat-engineering platoons that accompany “movement support detachments”—“OOD” is Russian acronym—that trail behind the first line of tanks in a battalion tactical group.

The platoons include two each of UR-77 mine-clearing vehicles and IMR-2/3 armored bulldozers. The wider OOD with its host of special vehicles—including monstrous BAT-2 path-clearing vehicles—travels alongside tanks or infantry fighting vehicles for protection.

If a unit runs into a minefield—likely discovering the hard way that mines are underfoot—the OOD moves forward. With tanks and IFVs laying covering fire, the UR-77 crew launches its MICLIC. “A single line charge will clear a path of 90 meters by six meters,” Lester Grau and Charles Bartles noted in The Russian Way of War.

The blast is impressive—and dangerous. During fighting in Chechnya in 1995, Russian engineers mistakenly tossed a MICLIC into their own lines, killing 28 Russian soldiers.

There’s a version of the Russian MICLIC, the UR-83P, that dismounted engineers can muscle into position. It’s this version that Russia apparently provided to separatists in Donbas, and which the separatists used for purposes other than clearing a minefield.

They lobbed the UR-83P across a town called Oleksandrivka. If there were still civilians in Oleksandrivka at the time of the blast, it’s possible they were killed or injured alongside the town’s Ukrainian defenders.

The Russian army and its allies long have used MICLICs for urban assaults, indiscriminately blasting entire city streets. The Syrian army deployed at least one UR-77 in vicious urban fighting in Damascus back in 2014.

But the Russians and Syrians aren’t alone. The U.S. Marine Corps fired its own MICLICs to clear booby traps in the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004. “This is an innovative use of existing technology and another example of the creativity and adaptability of the American soldier,” Long War Journal noted at the time.

Sure, but MICLICs are blunt instruments—raw firepower on battlefields where raw firepower can kill civilians alongside combatants. The unique terror that mines inflict on front-line infantry helps to explain why any army would develop such an indiscriminate countermeasure.

If and when Russia widens its war on Ukraine, the attackers’ mine-clearing line charges could be some of the most horrific weapons in what surely will be a horrific campaign.