Biden Defends Sending Cluster Munitions to Ukraine
US rushing weapons to the battlefield which many in the world are trying to ban
President Biden is defending his decision to send particularly dangerous cluster munitions to aid Ukraine in its battle to repulse the full-scale Russian invasion which began nearly a year-and-a-half ago.
Although the United States has been sending weapons and other military gear to Ukraine since the invasion began, the decision to add cluster bombs to that assistance has been controversial given widespread condemnation of the use of such munitions.
A cluster munition is a form of air-dropped or ground-launched explosive weapon that releases or ejects smaller submunitions. Commonly, this is a cluster bomb that ejects explosive bomblets that are designed to kill personnel and destroy vehicles.
Because cluster bombs release many small bomblets over a wide area, they pose risks to civilians both during attacks and afterwards. Unexploded bomblets can kill or maim civilians and/or unintended targets long after a conflict has ended, and are costly to locate and remove. The so-called failure rate ranges from 2 percent to 40 percent or more.
For these reasons, the international community has been working steadily for more than 15 years to begin to outlaw the use of these cluster munitions.
Russian forces reportedly already have been using cluster munitions in their assault on Ukrainian sovereignty which has long been marked with alleged war crimes.
It's within this context that Biden stood behind his decision to make these problematic weapons available to Ukrainian forces.
“Two things. I know it was a very difficult decision on my part. And by the way, I discussed this with our allies and discussed this with our friends up on [Capitol] Hill, and we are in a situation, where Ukraine continues to be brutally attacked across the board by munitions, by these cluster munitions with dud rates that are very high that are a danger to civilians. Number one,” he said. “Number two, the Ukrainians are running out of ammunition. The ammunition 155 millimeter weapons this is a war relating to munitions, and they're running out of that ammunition, and we are low on it.
“And so what I finally did took the recommendation of the Defense Department to — not permanently — but to allow for this transition period where we have more 155 [millimeter] weapons that emit these shells for Ukrainians to provide them with something that has a low dud rate,” Biden said, adding that Ukrainian troops would not use cluster munitions in civilian areas.
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