I was listening to Ukrainecast, the BBC’s regular podcast about the Russian assault on Ukraine, interviewing a man who is working on humanitarian demining. The Russian army has laid mines several layers deep across the southeastern area of Ukraine they have been occupying, a guest said.

And then I read a story in Der Spiegel that took me right back to a university hall in Sarajevo in 1996, where I was part of a group of long-term observers being briefed about mine safety by a British soldier. This was the paragraph: