I mentioned before that there is something fascinating about the eternal back and forth of offensive and defensive technologies & the arms race between things that want to make you explode and things that want to protect you from that.

There's this insidious Russian mining system — NVU, "Okhota" ("Hunt"), and its successor, the NVU-2. The original iteration was first tested back during the Soviet-Afghan war, I think. It's basically a semi-analog control unit that sequentially detonates the charges in the required sectors: meaning, you put up a bunch of anti-personnel mines, and each time someone walks by only one of them goes off, so the area is still mined and dangerous.

The Ukrainians have come up with a countermeasure — the "Artemida" system. It is dropped from a UAV, embedded into the ground and by design initiates the detonation sequence of NVU and NVU-2 devices by sending a seismic signal into the ground that simulates human movement.

It kills and maims people — but technology is sometimes a true marvel. Some clever contraption against another clever contraption.

P.S.

The "Artemida" device reminds me of the sandworm-summoning thumpers from Dune, and, funnily enough, the previous, non-technological measure to avoid the NVU system was to walk with irregular steps or move like an animal; that is, to do the Fremen sand walk, basically.