The U.S. announced a new military aid package to Ukraine on Friday that will include cluster munitions for the first time in the war.
Cluster munitions, also called cluster bombs, are banned by more than 100 countries due to the risks they pose to civilians, which is part of what prompted the Biden administration's initial decision not to provide them to Ukraine until now.
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"First, we base our security assistance decision on Ukraine's needs on the ground, and Ukraine needs artillery to sustain its offensive and defensive operations," national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on Friday. "Artillery is at the core of this conflict. Ukraine is firing thousands of rounds a day to defend against Russian efforts to advance and also to support its own efforts to retake its sovereign territory."
Cluster munitions are canisters that contain tens to hundreds of smaller bomblets and the outer shell breaks apart at a certain point during deployment with the bomblets dispersing over a swath of that area. The munitions have been banned by more than 100 countries on humanitarian grounds in part due to the danger they can pose to civilians and the significant dud rate. While some of the bomblets may not detonate as intended, they can remain active munitions for years or even decades, putting civilians at-risk potentially long after the conflict has ended.
The munitions are included in an $800 million arms package for Ukraine and will come in the form of artillery shells that can be fired from the 155 mm howitzers the U.S. has already provided to Ukraine. The M864 artillery shells contain 72 submunitions roughly the size of grenades, and instead of having a single impact spot, they can blanket an area larger than four football fields. These should help compensate for Ukraine’s limited conventional artillery stockpile.
"I will say that we have multiple variants of DPICMs in our stocks, and the ones that we are considering providing would not include older variants with dud rates that are higher than 2.35 percent," Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the pentagon's spokesman, told reporters on Thursday. "We are aware of reports out there from several decades ago that indicate that certain 155-mm DPICMs have higher dud rates, so we would be carefully selecting rounds with lower dud rates for which we have recent — recent testing data."
Ryder said DPICMs specifically have “anti-armor and anti-personnel capability,” adding, “Essentially it can be either loaded with shape charges, which are armor penetrating, or they can be loaded with fragmentary munitions, which are anti-personnel. So clearly, a capability that would be useful in any type of offensive operations.”
The United States is not party to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans signatories from using the weapons or transferring them to other countries, but the U.S. government largely stopped using cluster bombs in 2003 and has a parallel restriction on their transfer.
Not all lawmakers will support this move by the Biden administration due to the concerns for civilian casualties, in addition to humanitarian groups.
"We recognize that cluster munitions create a risk of civilian harm from unexploded ordnance," Sullivan added. "This is why we've deferred the decision for as long as we could. But there is also a massive risk of civilian harm if Russian troops and tanks roll over Ukrainian positions and take more Ukrainian territory and subjugate more Ukrainian civilians."
Laura Cooper, the Pentagon’s Europe chief, told lawmakers on the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week that “[dual-purpose improved conventional munition] DPICM would be useful, especially against dug-in Russian positions on the battlefield," while Army General Christopher G. Cavoli, the commander of U.S. European Command and Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, told the House Armed Services Committee in April, "It is a useful and very effective munition.”
Germany is constrained by the treaty. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said on Friday, "Germany has signed the convention, so it is no option for us."
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Biden's decision comes amid the first couple weeks of Ukraine's counteroffensive, which has thus far resulted in limited battlefield successes, despite hard conditions.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said their counteroffensive has been “slowed down” by Russian forces, he stated, and part of that is due to the weapons western countries have chosen not to give them — like cluster munitions until Friday. Zelensky said in some areas his forces can’t “even think of starting” to push forward because they do not have “the relevant weapons.”