Program changes mines to toys

DONETSK, Ukraine -- Next holiday season, Ukrainian children will find something new under their trees: plastic toy pelicans and sandbox tools.

The toys themselves are unremarkable: scoop-billed birds the size of a shoebox and mini shovel-and-pail sets. But their history is something else: In their former incarnation, these toys were casings for anti-personnel land mines.

The mines-to-toys project evolved from an $800,000 NATO-sponsored program to help demilitarize this Texas-sized country of 48 million people. It aims to reduce Ukraine's stockpile of some 6.4 million anti-personnel mines and help the country's massive defense complex retool for peaceful production.

The project is based at the formerly top-secret Donetsk State Chemical Plant in eastern Ukraine, where workers packed explosives into artillery shells and missiles.