NATO Border States, Ukraine Quit Ottawa Landmine Ban — SkimNews
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- Five European NATO countries bordering Russia — Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia — withdrew from the Ottawa Treaty in 2025, with Poland contracting state-owned Belma to mass-produce anti-personnel mines and Lithuania announcing it will resume domestic manufacture.
- Ukraine withdrew from the treaty in 2025, justifying the move on Russia's continued mine use; though the withdrawal does not take legal effect until the war ends, Ukraine is reportedly already deploying mines at scale.
- The Ottawa Treaty, signed in 1997 by 120+ countries and ratified by 166, never bound China, India, Russia, or the US, and roughly 25% of Ukraine is now mine-contaminated, with UNMAS estimating full demining will cost approximately $35 billion over 10 years.
- Landmine casualties exceeded 5,000 in 2025 according to the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor, with children comprising 90% of South Sudan's victims, underscoring that anti-personnel mines are designed to wound rather than kill, extending their postwar civilian toll for decades.
- Three US-Russia arms agreements — the INF Treaty, New Start, and Open Skies — have expired or been terminated, and Russia's 2023 exit ended the CFE treaty, removing the last pillars of bilateral conventional arms control.
- Simone Wisotzki of the Leibniz Peace Research Institute told DW that humanitarian arms control had been the only functioning area of the field "and that is no longer the case," warning the European withdrawals set a dangerous precedent for other parties to follow.
Why it matters: The Ottawa Treaty was the last functioning arms-control regime after INF, New Start, Open Skies, and CFE all collapsed — and it has now lost five NATO frontline states and Ukraine. With Poland, Lithuania, and others rebuilding domestic mine production and Ukraine already deploying mines, the civilian blast radius from current and future European conflicts just expanded, and the $35 billion Ukrainian demining bill shows the postwar cleanup tab is already coming due.
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