WAR IN UKRAINE | The US will announce this Friday the shipment of cluster bombs to kyiv

2023-07-06 22:46:58

The government of Joe Biden go back to cross another red line that had been marked in sending weapons to Ukraine and this Friday the United States is expected to announce that will provide cluster bombs to kyiv. The decision, which will include this controversial weaponry in other 800 million assistance package of dollars and which has been advanced by anonymous sources to various US media, promises to be controversy.

Also Known As fragmentation Ammunition, consists of bombs dropped from aircraft or artillery that separate in midair into multiple “submunitions” or “little bombs”with the ability to reach numerous targets over a vast area. She is rejected by gun control groups and human rights activists for her character indiscriminate and his impact on civilians, especially children, even after a contest. Weapons are considered with higher level of failures, since many of the submunitions they do not detonate initially, close to 20% according to some groups and up to 40% in some cases, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

This armament is also banned by all 123 countries that have adhered since 2008 to the Convention on cluster weapons. USAUkraine and Russia did not sign that convention, which entered into force in 2010, but the vast majority of US allies in NATO have done so, including Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy or Spain.

Giro de Biden

Partly because of concerns and reluctance of alliesfor months Biden had resisted to the requests of Volodimir Zelensky, that he had also urged Congress to put pressure on the White House, arguing that it would help them in the counteroffensive and overcome their disadvantage in both artillery and military personnel.

But also a 2009 law prohibits the US from exporting cluster bombs in case of failure rates of submunitions due to non-detonation greater than 1%, although Biden can bypass that limitation, as Donald Trump did in 2021 for a shipment to South Korea.

Last month, however, samples of a giro on the Democratic Administration’s stance. In a June appearance before Congress, a senior defense official testified that the Pentagon had determined that the munitions could be useful for Ukraine, “especially against Russian dug-out positions on the battlefield”.

This same Thursday, Brigadier General Pat Ryder, without definitively confirming the shipment, assured that the cluster bombs that are being considered to be provided to Ukraine will not include variants with non-detonation rates greater than 2.35%.

lethal effect

Numerous reports since the war began in February last year have found that tBoth Ukraine and especially Russia have used cluster bombs. In the first six months of the war alone, 689 people were killed according to the annual report of the Cluster Munition Coalitiona global civil society campaign that advocates for the eradication of these weapons.

That group in June wrote a letter in which it recalled that “any allegation of possible tactical benefits of the transfer and use of cluster munitions to Ukraine in defense of its territory ignore as he substantial damage they present to civilians As the international consensus on its prohibition.