Global Courant
President Joe Biden has decided to send US supplies of cluster munitions to Ukraine as part of his fight against Russia, defending the controversial move as urgently needed.
The weapons are part of a new military aid package worth up to $800 million.
The extra aid comes as Ukraine pushes for the reconquest of territory seized by Russia. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told ABC News that the counter-offensive went “according to plan,” but he would like to see progress made even faster.
Zelenskyy said any necessary equipment delivered to Ukraine will help his troops “move faster, save more lives, hold out for a longer time”.
But the decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine is not without reason, as human rights groups point out the danger they pose to civilians and numerous countries have banned them for more than a decade.
“We recognize that cluster munitions pose a risk to civilian casualties from unexploded ordnance,” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters. “That’s why we postponed the decision for as long as possible. But there is also a huge risk of civilian damage if Russian troops and tanks take over Ukrainian positions and take more Ukrainian territory and subjugate more Ukrainian civilians, because Ukraine does not have enough artillery. That is unbearable for us .”
Biden also defended the move where appropriate on Friday, telling ABC News’ Elizabeth Schulze that Ukraine is “out of ammunition.”
President Joe Biden delivers remarks on health care coverage and the economy at the White House in Washington, July 7, 2023.
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
Still the president told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria it was a “tough decision” to make.
Here’s what you need to know about the weapons.
What is cluster munitions?
Cluster munitions spread unguided submunitions, or bombs, as small as 20 kilograms over a large area, perhaps the size of several football fields. The US last used them during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The weapons can be fired from aircraft or from the ground. Depending on the type used, dozens to 600 bombs could be released at a time, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
“Weapons like these are extremely dangerous,” said Richard Weir, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch’s Crisis and Conflict Division. Weir noted that there are different types of submunition, some designed to penetrate armor or concrete, while others are made to release as many fragments against troops as possible.
A US defense official told lawmakers last month that they thought such weapons “would be useful” to Ukraine, “especially against entrenched Russian positions on the battlefield.”
Ukrainian military serviceman Igor Ovcharruck holds a harmless cluster bomb from an MSLR missile, among a display of pieces of missiles used by the Russian military that a Ukrainian ordnance expert said failed to explode on impact, in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine, October 21. , 2022.
Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters, FILE
But cluster munitions also pose a significant risk to civilians, as they are scattered haphazardly over an area and some release bombs that fail to explode on impact and can detonate much later – even decades later.
“These are very nasty, destructive weapons for battlefield use,” Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, told ABC News. “They are also particularly damaging to friendly soldiers and civilians after a conflict is over because all types of cluster munitions have a failure rate.”
The Pentagon said Friday they will send their state-of-the-art dual-purpose enhanced conventional munitions (DPICMs) with a failure rate or “dud rate” of 2.35% or less. Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl said they have hundreds of thousands of those rounds available.
Kahl contrasted that figure with the failure rate of the cluster munitions used by Russia against Ukraine, which he said is somewhere between 30 and 40%.
But Kimball said those who work in the gun control field believe the failure rate of that ammunition “is probably higher in the U.S. stockpile when it comes to actual wartime conditions.”
When asked if the dud investigations conducted by the Defense Department into the munitions being sent to Ukraine will be made public, Kahl said those reports are classified but that they have “a lot of confidence” in the numbers.
Why are they controversial?
More than 100 countries have essentially banned cluster munitions. Governments that signed the “Cluster Munitions Convention” in 2008 have committed themselves never to use, produce or stockpile cluster munitions.
Russia, Ukraine and the United States have not signed the treaty, although most NATO countries have.
“They can injure or kill people who are just going about their daily lives — children playing in playgrounds, people working their land,” Weir told ABC News.
“In that sense, they behave much like land mines,” Weir said. “So it’s the severe damage to the civilian population associated with these weapons that makes them so controversial.”
Officials said Ukraine has provided guarantees to minimize risk to civilians, including a promise not to use them in urban areas, and will commit to post-conflict demining efforts to find unexploded ordnance that poses a threat.
“I am as concerned about the humanitarian situation as anyone, but the worst thing for civilians in Ukraine is that Russia wins the war,” Kahl said. He added that the US will monitor how the systems are used and whether Ukrainian guarantees are fulfilled.
Anadolu agency via Getty Images
Human Rights Watch previously called on both Russia and Ukraine to stop using cluster munitions.
Weir said cluster munitions were involved in one of the war’s worst incidents of civilian casualties to date: the attack on Kramatorsk railway station in April 2022. At least 50 people died and more than a hundred were injured, ABC News reported at the time.
“That ripped people’s bodies apart and injured people all over the train station,” he said. “But this plays out again and again in regions all over Ukraine where there is fighting and where we have documented the use of different types of sub-munitions.”
Luis Martinez of ABC contributed to this report.
