GENEVA — Global deaths and injuries from landmines and unexploded ordnance surpassed 6,000 in 2024, the highest total recorded in four years, against a backdrop of threats that Finland, Poland and the Baltic states are preparing to leave the Ottawa Treaty just as Ukraine declares it is doing so. Dec. 1, 2025
Authors of the Landmine Monitor 2025 report registered more than 6,000 casualties last year — 1,945 dead and 4,325 wounded — with about nine in every 10 victims civilians and almost half women and children. The spike is in large part due to mine contamination in Syria and Myanmar, both outside the treaty, with over 2,000 incidents recorded for Myanmar, where government forces and non-state armed groups conducted intensive use of mines.
Landmine Monitor 2025 records casualties at four-year high
Landmine Monitor 2025 highlights that the new surge is not a one-off shock, but rather comes on top of a decade of stubbornly high figures. The human rights watchdog, the Landmine Monitor 2024 report, had already sounded an alarm over at least 5,757 casualties in 2023 — a rise of 22% given that in 2022, with civilians accounting for some 84 per cent of victims and children one-third of those injured in a detailed fact check by APOPO on its analysis of last year’s findings.
Earlier warnings now sound like a gruesome prelude. A 2018 press release from Humanity & Inclusion using the 2018 Landmine Monitor characterized a “third consecutive year” of startling numbers of casualties, with over 7,200 victims reported in 2017 after the numbers had nearly quadrupled since early this decade. Two years on, a 2020 briefing from Humanity & Inclusion reported 5,554 casualties in 2019 and warned that gains had begun to stall as conflict and improvised mines flourished. In 2019, a Reuters analysis of data from Landmine Monitor said that global mine deaths had roughly doubled from a low set in 2013, spurred by militants’ use of improvised devices in Afghanistan, Syria and Mali.
Landmine Monitor 2025 and the disintegration of the Ottawa Treaty
What is different in Landmine Monitor 2025 is the growing number of casualties and an unprecedented wave of withdrawals from the Mine Ban Treaty, or Ottawa Convention. The report notes that Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland are all in the middle of legally withdrawing from the pact because they believe Russia poses a greater security threat along NATO’s eastern edge, a shift first raised in March, when Poland and the Baltic states together announced plans to withdraw.
Finland has already submitted its formal instrument of withdrawal to the United Nations; under treaty rules, it will take legal effect in January 2026. President Alexander Stubb said in a July statement that the decision was based on “defence needs in a changed security environment”. He highlighted Finland’s long border with Russia, which remained outside the ban. Amnesty International has described the move as a “disturbing backward step, which potentially risks civilian lives,” and asserts that antipersonnel mines are inherently indiscriminate. Poland’s parliament has also authorised withdrawal , and ministers have publicly referenced restarting the production of antipersonnel mines as part of a more robust border defence stance.
Civil society groups say that a dangerous chipping away at one treaty to which almost all of Europe was once party. Humanity & Inclusion said in a June statement that the fact that states failed to push back strongly enough at mid-year Ottawa Treaty meetings in Geneva was a signal that the norm against landmines is no longer robustly defended.
Ukraine’s withdrawal deepens humanitarian alarm.
Landmine Monitor 2025 also comes just months after Ukraine took the unprecedented step of abandoning the treaty while fighting a full-scale war. Ukraine left the Ottawa Convention on June 29, when President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a decree stating that Kyiv is now the sixth nation to withdraw from or express intent to renounce the ban, according to a July statement by Humanity & Inclusion.
Humanitarian organisations recognise Ukraine’s right to self-defence. Still, caution that increased use of mines will further exacerbate the already immense levels of contamination on Ukrainian territory, which has become one of the world’s most mine-polluted countries following Russia’s mass deployment of antipersonnel mines in 2022. These same groups assert that the vast majority of landmine victims worldwide are civilians and further advise that turning back on treaty commitments during times of war could set a precedent other nations might be inclined to follow.
Landmine Monitor 2025 is in a protracted and unfinished struggle
For campaigners who have dedicated over two decades to creating the Mine Ban Treaty, Landmine Monitor 2025 is both a data set and an alarm. The new numbers reveal that, after earlier gains in driving down clearance and victim support, annual casualty totals have remained in the mid-thousands since 2015, with improvised mines, protracted conflicts and shrinking donor funds combining to keep communities underwater.
Several states parties are meeting again in Geneva this week for a stocktake of the treaty’s implementation, just as donor cuts have forced some mine-action programmes to reduce or close, a development the Landmine Monitor 2025 report implicates directly in shortcomings in survivor support and slower land clearance activities. Proponents argue that the decisions European governments, Ukraine, and their allies make now may well shape whether the norms established by the Ottawa Treaty bend or break.
As one such Geneva-based campaign put it in a recent call to “say no to the return of antipersonnel landmines“, the threat is a domino effect. If deliberately fewer and fewer states believe that landmines are legitimate tools for border defence, we could once again witness their renewed use, clearance delayed or derailed, and subsequent casualty figures spiking even further in future editions of Landmine Monitor 2025 and beyond.
For now, the data in Landmine Monitor 2025 and the decisions in Helsinki, Warsaw, the Baltic capitals and Kyiv all point in the same direction: a world once again experiencing more death from land mines — precisely at the moment when some of the treaty’s original champions have begun to step back from its constraints. Whether that trend will be arrested — or accelerated — is the overriding question hanging over this week’s discussions in Geneva and the next edition of the Landmine Monitor.
