In the fall of 2015, I was having drinks in Washington with a colleague at the time, now-MSNBC host Joy Reid. (I was working at NBC News.) Donald Trump was leading in the polls of the 2016 Republican presidential primary. But I was confident he would not win the nomination.
Very confident.
I told Joy, who is a friend, that Trump was experiencing a sugar high in the polls, not unlike Herman Cain did four years earlier. I predicted the Republican establishment would organize against Trump and embrace the obvious candidate for the party’s future, a kind of a Barack Obama for the right: Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.
Joy was equally confident. Trump was speaking about racial issues in a way that would resonate with the GOP base, she said. She hinted that neither I nor the GOP party establishment really understood that base. And she laughed as I hyped Rubio. Joy had lived in Florida before moving to New York City to work at MSNBC. She had covered Rubio closely and was extremely confident that he did not have the skills to defeat Trump, particularly if Trump made race a central issue in the campaign.
I remember this conversation from more than five years ago so clearly because it encapsulates much of my experience as a political journalist in the Trump era. In June 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy, I had been covering national politics for 13 years, including three presidential campaigns. I had been savvy at times — describing Obama as the likely winner of the 2008 Democratic nomination in January 2007, before he even formally announced his candidacy. I assumed I knew a lot about how politics in America worked.
Then Trump came along.
Over the next five-plus years, I learned a lot about covering national politics. Some lessons came the hard way: By being really wrong. So now that we’re about a month into a new presidential administration, I’m trying to keep those lessons front and center. What are they? Here are nine:
1. Listen more to Black people.
Appearing on ABC News’s “This Week” in July 2015, then-Rep. Keith Ellison (a Democrat who is now Minnesota’s attorney general), said he thought Trump had a decent chance of winning the GOP nomination. The other panelists on the segment with him laughed at Ellison’s remark. I’m not singling them out — at the time, I was mocking the idea of Trump winning the nomination myself, after all.
Ellison, like Joy, is Black, and that’s worth thinking about more. It wasn’t only Black political observers who proved prescientabout Trump.<a class="espn-footnote-link" data-footnote-id="1" href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/nine-lessons-i-learned-about-political-reporting-while-covering-trump/#fn-1" data-footnote-content="
This section could be about people of color, as opposed to just Black people. For example, from the start of Trump’s campaign in 2015, Univision’s Jorge Ramos centered his coverage around how Trump spoke about immigrants. CBS’s News Weijia Jiang, whose family immigrated to the U.S. from China when she was a kid, sometimes asked the president very blunt questions about racial issues. I thought fairly long and hard about the framing of this section of this article and will admit the obvious: Perhaps I am biased toward noticing the work of Black people because I am Black myself. Part of this is media dynamics — at least right now, many of the most high-profile writers and pundits are Black; not as many are Asian or Latino. But secondly, we are making a point about not just Black pundits but also Black voters. And Black voters have been more unified in opposing Trump than Asian or Hispanic Americans.
Two Black political experts stand out in particular. The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer argued that many of Trump’s supporters backed him because of his harshness toward conservatives’ perceived enemies (“The Cruelty Is the Point,” a Serwer piece was headlined.). And Ta-Nehisi Coates, then at The Atlantic, dubbed Trump “The First White President,” arguing that his rise was best understood as a backlash to Obama. Those pieces were written early in Trump’s presidency but are still memorable because they ended up accurately capturing some of the main themes of his tenure in office.
“After the Trump presidency, it should be crystal clear that newsroom diversity is essential to tell the stories defining our generations accurately,” CNN anchor Don Lemon, who is Black, wrote in a recent essay published in Politico. “Much like we regard the expertise of medical doctors, pilots and educators, we must also embrace, lean on and, most importantly, trust journalists who have both experience covering race, and experience living in Black bodies and bodies of color.”
Another Black journalist, the Washington Post’s Karen Attiah, wrote last month: “For many of us, the empowerment of non-White voices in a very White and male industry was never just about numbers, promotions or individual opportunities. It was because we knew that blind spots and denialism about the dark forces in this country would cause suffering.”
Black voters were also prescient about Trump. When I was on the campaign trail in 2015 and 2016, Black voters, most of whom strongly disliked Trump, were generally the most confident outside of Trump’s base that he could win the GOP nomination and presidency. In 2019 and 2020, Black voters I spoke to were often the most confident that Trump could win a second term and therefore felt Democrats should nominate the candidate who would be least offensive to white people (Joe Biden). The lesson here, in my view, is that Black people may understand the sensibilities of white people, particularly on racial issues, better than white people do themselves.
Not all Black people, of course. Then-President Obama seemed surprised by Trump’s ascent and victory. I also am Black and was slow to the story. Why? First, I (and I assume some other Black people) am not immune to the signaling of our broader society, which implies that the smartest people are usually white and male.
Secondly, most of the prominent Black political observers who were suggesting that Trump could be formidable, like Ellison and Joy, were openly left-leaning in their professional roles. I tended back then to think such people’s opinions were clouding their views of the facts, while a person like me, not in an opinion role, could see politics more clearly. Which leads me to a second lesson …
2. Mix up my media diet.
Going into 2015, I looked for insight about politics mostly from other political reporters or political scientists who focused on the U.S. (as opposed to journalists who are opinion writers and columnists and scholars who don’t specialize in American politics). That’s who I followed on Twitter and that group shaped my view of what was happening. Those aren’t bad sources of information. But Trump himself and how he reshaped American politics often befuddled traditional experts on American politics, who were looking to compare and contrast things that he did with Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama and other more establishment politicians.
My thinking about Trump sharpened after I started reading a broader range of work. I learned a lot from scholars who specialized in sociology (the University of North Carolina’s Tressie McMillan Cottom, for example) and history (there’s New York University’s Ruth Ben-Ghait and the University of Pittsburgh’s Lara Putnam), and from writers who had studied governments and leaders abroad (author Sarah Kendzior, for example). I also gain new insights from opinion writers on the left (The New York Times’s Jamelle Bouie) and the right (The Atlantic’s David Frum and Peter Wehner, who also writes for The New York Times). None of these people were overly reliant on traditional models for covering politics and trapped by those norms.
Similarly, before the Trump era, I mostly relied on outlets like The Times, the Washington Post, Politico and CNN to get a sense of political news and a read on what people across the ideological spectrum were thinking. After all, all those publications try to feature both Republicans and Democrats. But the rise of not only Trump but also Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2015 caught me by surprise. And I think that surprise was in part due to my media diet being dominated by establishment-oriented media outlets in which the ideological views expressed generally ranged from Hillary Clinton on the left to Jeb Bush on the right. Now, I’m a big reader of the American Prospect, which covers the news from the perspective of the Democratic Party’s more liberal wing. I don’t watch a ton of TV news, but following the Fox News Twitter feed is usually a much better gauge of opinion among conservatives than the right-leaning columnists at The Post or The Times.
Another way to find more diverse sources of information is Twitter. I don’t have to guess what activists in both parties are doing or thinking — they are often publicly announcing their views and sharing articles they read to come to those views.
Put another way …
3. Don’t be too reliant on political insiders.
One of the reasons that I was so confident back in 2015 that Trump would not win the nomination was that the high-level Republican contacts I had accumulated from more than a decade in D.C. journalism kept telling me he would not win. Looking back, there was likely some amount of motivated reasoning at play there — many of these Republicans didn’t personally like Trump and were surely hoping he would lose.
This dynamic continued for the next five years. Senior Republican officials told me and other reporters the GOP might take the nomination from Trump at the 2016 convention; Trump had almost no chance of winning the general election; his top aides would push him toward governing like a traditional president, and some Republicans would back impeachment over Trump’s effort to get Ukraine to announce an investigation into his political rival Biden.
The wrongheaded reliance on GOP insiders culminated in what in hindsight was a huge media mistake: initially downplaying Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results. .
“The president has no clear endgame to actually win the election — and, in an indication he may be starting to come to terms with his loss, he is talking privately about running again in 2024. Trump aides, advisers and allies said there is no grand strategy to reverse the election results,” the Washington Post wrote in a Nov. 11 story.
Another line in the article was this: “Asked about Trump’s ultimate plan, one senior administration official chuckled and said, ‘You’re giving everybody way too much credit right now.’”
The headline of the Post piece was, “Trump insists he’ll win, but aides say he has no real plan to overturn results and talks of 2024 run.” Not a single Trump aide was quoted by name saying Trump would not contest the results.
The same day, Politico downplayed Trump’s attempts to contest the election, in a story with the headline, “They know he’s lost — let’s talk about the real world.” The effort to contest the election was “mostly performance art,” Politico said, again not quoting a single Trump aide by name making this point.
Perhaps Trump never had a “clear endgame” or “ultimate plan.” But his extended efforts to contest the results suggest that he had not “come to terms with his loss” and that his moves were not “mostly performance art” worth chuckling about. Major news outlets should not have relied almost wholly on unnamed sources in these stories. It’s likely that this kind of coverage — insiders quoted in major news outlets downplaying the seriousness of what Trump was doing — contributed to an environment in which the news media was slow to capture the gravity of what was happening: The president of the United States making a sustained effort to stay in office after he lost an election.. .
And it wasn’t just high-level Republicans and the media downplaying Trump’s actions. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spent much of the first half of 2019 predicting Democrats would not move to impeach Trump and implying Trump would not do anything that forced their hands. You know how that turnedout.
4. Move on from both sides-ism.
Some of the worst coverage from political journalists in the Trump era, in my view, stemmed from worries about being perceived as not neutral and objective and therefore biased against Republicans. It is true that individual journalists often lean left personally, although many of them work inside large corporations or for owners who tend to be more liberal on identity issues like immigration but not as liberal on economic policy. (In other words, it is not at all clear the liberal leanings of journalists personally result in disproportionately anti-Republican content.)
That said, the Republican Party has spent years attacking journalists as being biased against the GOP, a contention some journalists have tried to rebut by making sure their coverage is equally critical of both parties.
There are also some business incentives that push media outlets toward trying to appear equally balanced between the two parties. Publications like Axios and Politico are valuable to their audiences in part because they deliver information about what is happening inside in both parties. Regularly suggesting that Trump was saying racist things might have reduced those publications’ abilities to get access to GOP sources and thereby tell those insider accounts.
Even outlets that aren’t as focused on insider reporting, like ABC News and FiveThirtyEight, have rank-and-file conservatives and Trump supporters among their consumers and want to keep them. Those consumers might flee if they view coverage of Trump and the Republican Party from these outlets as being too negative.
So in the Trump era, journalists were often faced with a choice: straightforwardly describe Trump’s behavior, which would sound negative and lead to more criticism from conservatives of liberal bias; or soft-pedal Trump’s behavior and make strained analogies to Democratic politicians to reduce accusations they were being partisan.
Eventually (and perhaps inevitably), many journalists eventually took the first course. Coverage of Trump became very negative. I moved in this general direction myself — from a wariness about covering Trump bluntly and being cast as partisan to covering Trump directly and without hesitation.
As Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron told the German news outlet Der Spiegel in an interview this month, “We had to be much more forthright about Trump’s mendacity, his lies over the course of the administration. We needed to call them that from the very beginning. We were very much operating on good principle; and let’s be fair, he was president, he was duly elected. But he was exploiting that. He was exploiting our principles.”
What I learned and will carry forward is that journalism can’t really come from “the view from nowhere,” a term New York University professor Jay Rosen uses for the posture of neutrality that had become a norm in political journalism. As Rosen has said, that view, among other things, “places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position ‘impartial.’”
But journalism is a reality-based, evidence-based profession — it comes from somewhere! — so of course a person like Trump, who lies constantly, will be covered more negatively than Obama or Biden, who don’t lie as often. Journalism would be severely constrained without the First Amendment being protected by the government, so American journalists inevitably will be pro-democracy and wary of people who exhibit antidemocratic tendencies like Trump. What I am suggesting for myself and other journalists is not to be left wing (or right wing) but to prioritize accuracy, evidence and truth over appearing neutral and centrist.
“Strategy coverage, both sides do it, who’s up and who’s down, winners and losers, controversy of the day, access journalism …. all these forms were spectacularly ill-matched to Donald Trump when he emerged as a threat to American democracy,” Rosen wrote on his personal blog in mid-November.
This insider, access-based coverage was a hallmark of the Trump era. But as a reader of news and a journalist trying to tell stories about policy and identity, these stories were often a distraction. They were full of unnamed sources, so it was often hard to know exactly how to interpret the information or if it could be relied upon. (Remember the flawed postelection reporting I referred to earlier.) These stories rarely told deep narratives about policy. They rarely captured the identity politics of Trump, in part because it was unlikely reporters who described Trump’s words as racist would get access to insiders in his administration.
Access journalism in fact cuts against two of the solutions I described above: reporters of color playing more prominent roles (Trump was often mean to Black female reporters in particular, so assessing their job performance based on their ability to get inside information from Trump and his aides wouldn’t make much sense) and less both sides-ism.
“You use your access in order to move your story forward and that means certain things you’re going to give a pass,” journalist Soledad O’Brien said on the podcast “Hear To Slay” hosted by author Roxane Gay and Cottom, in describing the weaknesses of journalism in the Trump era.
We’re not going to get major news outlets to stop doing this kind of coverage. These insider stories can be fun to read, particularly in a fractious administration. And Trump’s administration was quite fractious. Occasionally, they unearth major news. And for individual reporters, showing you have access to top administration sources can build your career, since editors want to hire people who break news.
But I will not be reading many more stories (or writing any), for example, about Meena Harris until it’s clear to me she is playing some major role in the government’s policies, as opposed to being an interesting person the media writes about often. (Harris is Vice President Kamala Harris’s niece, and is very active on social media.) I hope news outlets do fewer of these stories. More importantly, even if news outlets continue to do insider journalism, they should make great effort to also feature journalists who offer deep insights about American politics, but not from an insider perspective, like Ronald Brownstein, who works at the Atlantic and CNN, and the New York Times’ Astead Herndon.
6. Embrace uncertainty.
I was so certain Trump would not win the GOP nomination in 2015 in part because I had become taken with a political science book called “The Party Decides.” That book suggested leaders in each party often steer voters toward some candidates in presidential nominating contests and away from others. GOP party leaders were almost universally opposed to Trump’s candidacy at first, and I kept assuming this lack of elite support would keep him from winning.
This was an important lesson for the next five years. The lesson, in my view, is not that we should ignore historical trends like those cited in “The Party Decides” (or, as another example, election forecasts, like those at FiveThirtyEight, that aggregate polls based on how predictive they’ve been historically). After all, “The Party Decides” theory was basically right in 2020 — Democratic elites embraced Biden over Sanders and the party’s voters followed.
Where I think I went wrong in 2015 was treating such data and trends as a source of certainty — “this happened before, therefore it will happen again.” They aren’t completely predictive. Now, if someone asks me who is going to win a race, I say, “Candidate X is leading, but anything could happen.” I try not to write off candidates like I did with Trump. I still make predictions about races, but not so I can show how prescient I am, but to test my assumptions.
So in the run-up to the Georgia Senate runoffs, I told everyone who asked me that I thought the Republicans would win those races. My assumptions were Georgia leaned a bit red and some Georgia swing voters would be wary of giving Democrats control of the White House, House and Senate. I was wrong. That’s fine. I think it is useful for FiveThirtyEight listeners and readers to hear my assumptions, since they colored how I covered the race. The key, though, is to treat your assumptions with care and a little fear even. I didn’t ignore the Democratic candidates in Georgia because I thought they were underdogs — I covered them extensively.
That said, even if my coverage of elections and other upcoming events has improved, there is another problem: I am still doing too much coverage of the future. We are in the midst of an extraordinary time in American politics. There is no need to project how Trump-like the 2024 Republican presidential nominee will be. We can’t predict that far into the future and we don’t need to — there are so many important stories about the Republican Party happening right now.
Or, to go back to the example of how media outlets covered Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results: There was a lot of focus on whether Trump would eventually accept the results and that coverage inevitably led to predictions and speculation. But what might happen was much less important than what was happening in the moment — the American president making constant and false claims of election fraud and having closed-door meetings with officials in swing states as their election results were being resolved.
7. Learn more about identity issues.
I was pretty conscious of issues around race and identity before the rise of Trump — I had worked as an editor at a Black news publication, theGrio.com. But like a lot of political reporters pre-Trump, I largely covered racial issues through the prism of people of color — writing stories about “the Black vote in state X,” or “the Latino vote in state Y.” I didn’t really think as much about white people as having a racial identity and how that might shape their political views.
But over the past few years it’s become clear that, on some level, all politics is identity politics, which means I need to read a lot of history about how various identities have formed and read a lot of news about identities that are forming now (like QAnon followers).
8. Cover “government.”
The media critic Dan Froomkin says reporters on beats like the White House and Congress should think of themselves as covering “government,” not politics. That seems right to me. Covering government means we should be scrutinizing and evaluating, for example, how Biden’s immigration policies work.
But you can’t cover government without knowing something about the underlying issues the government is trying to address. So I and other reporters on these “political” beats have to become more versed in policy issues. If all you really know how to do is cover electoral politics, you end up treating every story like an election — who’s up, who’s down, how will this affect swing voters in the next election.
“If you have a hammer, everything’s a nail,” said O’Brien. “What White House and political reporters like to do is the horse race, who’s winning, who is coming across as strong.”
Whew. So I learned a lot, but still have a lot to learn. And that’s OK. If nothing else, I am hoping this article itself is an illustration of the ninth, meta-lesson that I learned in covering Trump: Journalists covering elections and governments should be humble. Our sample size is tiny: There have been 117 Congresses, 59 presidential elections and 46 presidents in all of U.S. history. We live in a rapidly changing world. We as journalists have to adapt to these changes and still always assume that we aren’t getting the story completely right.
In my case, I’m already pretty nervous about bungling things. I just wrote a long essay about the lessons I learned covering Trump. But Joe Biden is president now. Some of those lessons might not apply — and surely there will be new lessons from the Biden years. But no matter what, you heard it here first, in 2024, Biden will … I have no idea. I will stay humble and you should stay tuned.
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Democrats who control both chambers of the Virginia legislature are hoping to make good on promises made on the campaign trail, including becoming the first Southern state to expand constitutional protections for abortion access.
The House Privileges and Elections Committee advanced three proposed constitutional amendments Wednesday, including a measure to protect reproductive rights. Its members also discussed measures to repeal a now-defunct state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and ways to revise Virginia’s process to restore voting rights for people who served time for felony crimes.
“This meeting was an important next step considering the moment in history we find ourselves in,” Democratic Del. Cia Price, the committee chair, said during a news conference. “We have urgent threats to our freedoms that could impact constituents in all of the districts we serve.”
The at-times raucous meeting will pave the way for the House and Senate to take up the resolutions early next year after lawmakers tabled the measures last January. Democrats previously said the move was standard practice, given that amendments are typically introduced in odd-numbered years. But Republican Minority Leader Todd Gilbert said Wednesday the committee should not have delved into the amendments before next year’s legislative session. He said the resolutions, particularly the abortion amendment, need further vetting.
“No one who is still serving remembers it being done in this way ever,” Gilbert said after the meeting. “Certainly not for something this important. This is as big and weighty an issue as it gets.”
The Democrats’ legislative lineup comes after Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin, to the dismay of voting-rights advocates, rolled back a process to restore people’s civil rights after they completed sentences for felonies. Virginia is the only state that permanently bans anyone convicted of a felony from voting unless a governor restores their rights.
“This amendment creates a process that is bounded by transparent rules and criteria that will apply to everybody — it’s not left to the discretion of a single individual,” Del. Elizabeth Bennett-Parker, the patron of the voting rights resolution, which passed along party lines, said at the news conference.
Though Democrats have sparred with the governor over their legislative agenda, constitutional amendments put forth by lawmakers do not require his signature, allowing the Democrat-led House and Senate to bypass Youngkin’s blessing.
Instead, the General Assembly must pass proposed amendments twice in at least two years, with a legislative election sandwiched between each statehouse session. After that, the public can vote by referendum on the issues. The cumbersome process will likely hinge upon the success of all three amendments on Democrats’ ability to preserve their edge in the House and Senate, where they hold razor-thin majorities.
It’s not the first time lawmakers have attempted to champion the three amendments. Republicans in a House subcommittee killed a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights in 2022, a year after the measure passed in a Democrat-led House. The same subcommittee also struck down legislation supporting a constitutional amendment to repeal an amendment from 2006 banning marriage equality.
On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers voted 16-5 in favor of legislation protecting same-sex marriage, with four Republicans supporting the resolution.
“To say the least, voters enacted this (amendment) in 2006, and we have had 100,000 voters a year become of voting age since then,” said Del. Mark Sickles, who sponsored the amendment as one of the first openly gay men serving in the General Assembly. “Many people have changed their opinions of this as the years have passed.”
A constitutional amendment protecting abortion previously passed the Senate in 2023 but died in a Republican-led House. On Wednesday, the amendment passed on party lines.
If successful, the resolution proposed by House Majority Leader Charniele Herring would be part of a growing trend of reproductive rights-related ballot questions given to voters. Since 2022, 18 questions have gone before voters across the U.S., and they have sided with abortion rights advocates 14 times.
The voters have approved constitutional amendments ensuring the right to abortion until fetal viability in nine states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Ohio and Vermont. Voters also passed a right-to-abortion measure in Nevada in 2024, but it must be passed again in 2026 to be added to the state constitution.
As lawmakers debated the measure, roughly 18 members spoke. Mercedes Perkins, at 38 weeks pregnant, described the importance of women making decisions about their own bodies. Rhea Simon, another Virginia resident, anecdotally described how reproductive health care shaped her life.
Then all at once, more than 50 people lined up to speak against the abortion amendment.
“Let’s do the compassionate thing and care for mothers and all unborn children,” resident Sheila Furey said.
The audience gave a collective “Amen,” followed by a round of applause.
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Associated Press writer Geoff Mulvihill in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, contributed to this report.
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Olivia Diaz is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative.
NEW YORK (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump says he will nominate anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, putting him in charge of a massive agency that oversees everything from drug, vaccine and food safety to medical research and the social safety net programs Medicare and Medicaid.
“For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social site announcing the appointment. Kennedy, he said, would “Make America Great and Healthy Again!”
Kennedy, a former Democrat who ran as an independent in this year’s presidential race, abandoned his bid after striking a deal to give Trump his endorsement with a promise to have a role in health policy in the administration.
He and Trump have since become good friends, with Kennedy frequently receiving loud applause at Trump’s rallies.
The expected appointment was first reported by Politico Thursday.
A longtime vaccine skeptic, Kennedy is an attorney who has built a loyal following over several decades of people who admire his lawsuits against major pesticide and pharmaceutical companies. He has pushed for tighter regulations around the ingredients in foods.
With the Trump campaign, he worked to shore up support among young mothers in particular, with his message of making food healthier in the U.S., promising to model regulations imposed in Europe. In a nod to Trump’s original campaign slogan, he named the effort “Make America Healthy Again.”
It remains unclear how that will square with Trump’s history of deregulation of big industries, including food. Trump pushed for fewer inspections of the meat industry, for example.
Kennedy’s stance on vaccines has also made him a controversial figure among Democrats and some Republicans, raising question about his ability to get confirmed, even in a GOP-controlled Senate. Kennedy has espoused misinformation around the safety of vaccines, including pushing a totally discredited theory that childhood vaccines cause autism.
He also has said he would recommend removing fluoride from drinking water. The addition of the material has been cited as leading to improved dental health.
HHS has more than 80,000 employees across the country. It houses the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Medicare and Medicaid programs and the National Institutes of Health.
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, currently has a lawsuit pending against a number of news organizations, among them The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy took leave from the group when he announced his run for president but is listed as one of its attorneys in the lawsuit.
NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) — In a Cypriot National Guard camp, Ukrainians are being trained on how to identify, locate and dispose of landmines and other unexploded munitions that litter huge swaths of their country, killing and maiming hundreds of people, including children.
Analysts say Ukraine is among the countries that are the most affected by landmines and discarded explosives, as a result of Russia’s ongoing war.
According to U.N. figures, some 399 people have been killed and 915 wounded from landmines and other munitions since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, equal to the number of casualties reported from 2014-2021. More than 1 in 10 of those casualties have been children.
The economic impact is costing billions to the Ukrainian economy. Landmines and other munitions are preventing the sowing of 5 million hectares, or 10%, of the country’s agricultural land.
Cyprus stepped up to offer its facilities as part of the European Union’s Military Assistance Mission to Ukraine. So far, almost 100 Ukrainian armed forces personnel have taken part in three training cycles over the last two years, said Cyprus Foreign Ministry spokesperson Theodoros Gotsis.
“We are committed to continuing this support for as long as it takes,” Gotsis told the Associated Press, adding that the Cyprus government has covered the 250,000 euro ($262,600) training cost.
Cyprus opted to offer such training owing to its own landmine issues dating back five decades when the island nation was ethnically divided when Turkey invaded following a coup that sought union with Greece. The United Nations has removed some 27,000 landmines from a buffer zone that cuts across the island, but minefields remain on either side. The Cypriot government says it has disposed of all anti-personnel mines in line with its obligations under an international treaty that bans the use of such munitions.
In Cyprus, Ukrainians undergo rigorous theoretical and practical training over a five-week Basic Demining and Clearance course that includes instruction on distinguishing and safely handling landmines and other explosive munitions, such as rockets, 155 mm artillery shells, rocket-propelled grenades and mortar shells.
Theoretical training uses inert munitions identical to the actual explosives.
Most of the course is comprised of hands-on training focusing on the on-site destruction of unexploded munitions using explosives, the chief training officer told the Associated Press. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he’s not authorized to disclose his identity for security reasons.
“They’re trained on ordnance disposal using real explosives,” the officer said. “That will be the trainees’ primary task when they return.”
Cypriot officials said the Ukrainian trainees did not want to be either interviewed or photographed.
Defusing discarded munitions or landmines in areas where explosive charges can’t be used — for instance, near a hospital — is not part of this course because that’s the task of highly trained teams of disposal experts whose training can last as long as eight months, the officer said.
Trainees, divided into groups of eight, are taught how to operate metal detectors and other tools for detecting munitions like prodders — long, thin rods which are used to gently probe beneath the ground’s surface in search of landmines and other explosive ordnance.
Another tool is a feeler, a rod that’s used to detect booby-trapped munitions. There are many ways to booby-trap such munitions, unlike landmines which require direct pressure to detonate.
“Booby-trapped munitions are a widespread phenomenon in Ukraine,” the chief training officer explained.
Training, primarily conducted by experts from other European Union countries, takes place both in forested and urban areas at different army camps and follows strict safety protocols.
The short, intense training period keeps the Ukrainians focused.
“You see the interest they show during instruction: they ask questions, they want to know what mistakes they’ve made and the correct way of doing it,” the officer said.
Humanitarian data and analysis group ACAPS said in a Jan. 2024 report that 174,000 sq. kilometers (67,182 sq. miles) or nearly 29% of Ukraine’s territory needs to be surveyed for landmines and other explosive ordnance.
More than 10 million people are said to live in areas where demining action is needed.
Since 2022, Russian forces have used at least 13 types of anti-personnel mines, which target people. Russia never signed the 1997 Ottawa Convention banning the use of anti-personnel mines, but the use of such mines is nonetheless considered a violation of its obligations under international law.
Russia also uses 13 types of anti-tank mines.
The International Campaign to Ban Landmines said in its 2023 Landmine Monitor report that Ukrainian government forces may have also used antipersonnel landmines in contravention of the Mine Ban Treaty in and around the city of Izium during 2022, when the city was under Russian control.
