Defusing Despair, One Inch at a Time

This story is based on firsthand reporting from Ukraine by Nastassia Kantorowicz Torres and was co-written with AFPC member Mitzi Perdue in New York.

It is freezing in Kharkiv, Ukraine—about 20 degrees Fahrenheit—and a group of students, along with writer Nastassia Kantorowicz, are watching mine clearance expert Chris Garrett kneel in the snow. His tattooed hands gently probe the frozen ground in front of him, one millimeter at a time. He is demonstrating how to search for landmines when the ground is covered with snow and the soil is frozen solid.

“We all stood back, still as sentinels,” Kantorowicz recalls, “watching the man who had risked his life thousands of times to make other lives possible.”

Garrett turned and pointed out, “If you move too fast, or push too hard, you might blow yourself up.”  Then he invited the students—many of whom had never seen a landmine before—to kneel and practice. 

“We’ll probably be here for hundreds of years,” Kantorowicz heard Garrett say. 

He wasn’t exaggerating. Ukraine is now the most mined country on Earth. Nearly a quarter of its land is contaminated with landmines or unexploded ordnance—left behind not only by Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, but also from earlier conflicts, including World War I and II.

Several months later, Kantorowicz met with Garrett again over coffee, just after he’d returned from a mine clearance mission in Kharkiv Oblast. Now that the ground had thawed and the snow had melted, it was easier for an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) expert like Garrett to work. 

She thanked him for his service, and as always, he smiled and replied, “We like to keep busy.” That meant risking his life, inch by inch, and training others to do the same. He told her he was heading back to Kharkiv Oblast in the coming days for more clearance work and instruction.

Chris, 40, had first come to Ukraine in 2014 as a foreign military volunteer and EOD expert. A British citizen from the Isle of Man, he returned in 2022—this time not with a weapon, but with the tools for a different kind of fight: defusing mines. This involved training government agencies and working shoulder to shoulder with local police and military on what he called “the longest clean-up operation in modern history.”

In 2022, alongside combat medic Courtney Pollock, he co-founded Prevail Together, a grassroots NGO dedicated to Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) and trauma care in Ukraine. Headquartered in a modest house on the outskirts of Kyiv, the organization is powered by volunteers—seven at last count—many of them former military or emergency medical professionals from the U.S., U.K., and EU.

They share bedrooms, a single bathroom, and cut living expenses to the bone so they can afford vehicle fuel and equipment. Their translators are volunteers, too—now fluent in the highly technical language of EOD, where a single mistranslated word in a training session could cost lives.

Landmines are the second deadliest threat on Ukraine’s front lines—just behind drones. And they’re evolving. “We’re not just finding leftover Soviet mines anymore,” said one volunteer. “Now it’s microchipped devices, pressure-triggered or vibration-sensitive. Some are embedded in homes. You can’t just demolish a building to get rid of them.” For now, the most cost-effective clearance tool remains a human being with nerves of steel.

Despite their remarkable impact, Prevail Together operates solely on donations. Their long-term goal is to secure official landmine clearance and ordnance disposal status from the Ukrainian government. The problem is, the required permit carries a $100,000 fee—prohibitively expensive for a small NGO. While the fee is meant to screen out bad actors and war profiteers, unfortunately it also slows support from dedicated, life-saving teams like Prevail Together.

Kantorowicz’s story has a heart-wrenching ending. She reports that on May 7th, just several days ago, Chris Garrett and another team member were killed by an explosion near Izyum.

The world lost a brave and kind soul. Still, the seeds he planted—in the teams he trained and the civilians who now walk safely across land he cleared—will continue to grow.

Though Chris Garrett is gone, others will live because he made the world a little safer, one careful inch at a time. Generations unborn will live better lives because he lived.