WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s administration has decided to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine and is expected to announce on Friday that the Pentagon will send thousands of them as part of a new military aid package worth up to $800 million for the war effort against Russia, according to people familiar with the decision.
The decision comes despite widespread concerns that the bombs have a track record of causing civilian casualties and sparked a call from the United Nations to both Russia and Ukraine to avoid using them. The Pentagon says it will provide munitions that have a reduced “dud rate,” meaning fewer unexploded rounds that can result in unintended civilian deaths.
U.S. officials said Thursday they expect the military aid to Ukraine will be announced on Friday. The weapons will come from Pentagon stocks and include Bradley and Stryker armored vehicles and an array of ammunition, such as rounds for howitzers and the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, officials said.
Long sought by Ukraine, cluster bombs are weapons that open in the air, releasing submunitions, or bomblets, that are dispersed over a large area and are intended to wreak destruction on multiple targets at once.
The officials and others familiar with the decision spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.
Ukrainian officials have asked for the weapons to aid their campaign to push through lines of Russian troops and make gains in the ongoing counteroffensive. Russian forces are already using cluster munitions on the battlefield and in populated civilian areas, U.S. officials have said.
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, some cluster munitions leave behind bomblets that have a high rate of failure to explode — up to 40% in some cases. U.S. officials said Thursday that the rate of unexploded ordnance for the munitions that will be going to Ukraine is under 3% and therefore will mean fewer unexploded bombs left behind to threaten civilians.
At a Pentagon briefing Thursday, Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said the Defense Department has “multiple variants” of the munitions and “the ones that we are considering providing would not include older variants with (unexploding) rates that are higher than 2.35%.”
Ryder would not say whether Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has reached out to NATO counterparts to address some of their concerns on the use of cluster munitions.
If the decision were made to provide the munitions to Ukraine, he said, the U.S. “would be carefully selecting rounds with lower dud rates, for which we have recent testing data.”
Ryder said they can be loaded with charges that can penetrate armor and fragment so they can hit multiple personnel — “a capability that would be useful in any type of offensive operations.” Ryder said the Russians have been using cluster munitions that have a very high dud rate.
Asked about the move by the U.S., which has led allied support of Ukraine, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg stressed on Friday that the military alliance takes no position on cluster munitions.
“So it is for these individual allies then to make those decisions,” Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels.
Oleksandra Ustinova, a member of Ukraine’s parliament who has been advocating that Washington send more weapons, noted that Ukrainian forces have had to disable mines from much of the territory they are winning back from Russia. As part of that process, Ukrainians will also be able to catch any unexploded ordnance from cluster munitions.
