The US contemplates the shipment of cluster munitions to Ukraine amid misgivings about international agreements

July 1 () –

The White House is contemplating the possibility of sending cluster munitions to Ukraine, although no decision has yet been made in this regard on a transfer that would directly contravene an international agreement against the use of this munition to which neither Washington nor Kiev are party, although yes many of his allies.

Sources from the Biden Administration confirmed to NBC that the issue is under discussion, as the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, also ended up acknowledging late on Friday.

The sources indicate that a possible announcement in this regard could take place at the beginning of this month and that there is, right now, “some inclination” in favor of the delivery of this “dual purpose improved conventional ammunition” (DPICM, for its acronym in English, and that in reality it is a weapon of indiscriminate range, responsible for the death and maiming of hundreds of civilians every year throughout the world.

Other official US sources have told that this type of munition “would certainly have a significant effect on the battlefield”, but there is the problem that the United States would have to face a serious international reaction if it finally decides to approve the shipment, apart from the fact that the US Army itself had already shown its misgivings about the use of cluster bombs due to the danger they represented to the civilian population.

Specifically, the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, signed by more than a hundred states, including Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain, for example, strictly prohibits its 107 signatories from using, developing, producing, acquiring , storage and transfer of this class of weapons.

Although Washington is not a signatory, it should be remembered that the US Army began to reduce the production of this ammunition in 2016. A year later, a report from the US Army Central Command described the terrible effect of the hundreds of small explosives disseminated by each rocket carried against civilian populations.

Cluster munitions have already been used by Russia in the war in Ukraine, according to NGOs such as Amnesty International, as for example in the attack that occurred on February 25, 2022, shortly after the start of the war, against a civilian refuge in the northeast Ukraine.

“There is no possible justification,” Amnesty Secretary General Agnès Callamard lamented at the time, “for dropping cluster munitions in populated areas, an inherently indiscriminate weapon, prohibited by international conventions and showing flagrant disregard for the lives of civilians”.