WASHINGTON – 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.
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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 were not authorized to discuss the move publicly before the announcement and 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.
“We will have to de-mine anyway, but it’s better to have this capability,” Ustinova said.
She credited Congress with pushing the Democratic president's administration over several months to change its position on the munitions.
Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week that the U.S. has been thinking about providing the cluster munitions “for a long time.”
“The Ukrainians have asked for it, other European countries have provided some of that, the Russians are using it,” Milley said during a speech at the National Press Club.
Cluster bombs can be fired by artillery that the U.S. has provided to Ukraine, and the Pentagon has a large stockpile of them.
The last large-scale American use of cluster bombs was during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, according to the Pentagon. But U.S. forces considered them a key weapon during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, according to Human Rights Watch. In the first three years of that conflict, it is estimated the U.S.-led coalition dropped more than 1,500 cluster bombs in Afghanistan.
Proponents of banning cluster bombs say they kill indiscriminately and endanger civilians long after their use
The International Committee of the Red Cross said it is clear “that where cluster munitions have been used on a large scale, they cause significant numbers of preventable civilian casualties.” Male civilians, including farmers or others out working in fields, are the main victims, the committee said, citing a 2007 study. Children are the second most common victims, attracted by the submunitions’ size, shape and color.
A convention banning the use of cluster bombs has been joined by more than 120 countries that agreed not to use, produce, transfer or stockpile the weapons and to clear them after they’ve been used.
The United States, Russia and Ukraine are among the countries that have not signed on.
Marta Hurtado, speaking for the U.N. human rights office, said Friday “the use of such munitions should stop immediately and not be used in any place.”
“We will urge the Russian Federation and Ukraine to join the more than 100 states that have ratified the convention of cluster munitions and that effectively ban their use,” she added.
It is unclear how America’s NATO allies would view the U.S. providing cluster bombs to Ukraine and whether the issue might prove divisive for their largely united support of Kyiv. More than two-thirds of the 30 countries in the alliance are signatories of the 2010 convention on cluster munitions.
Germany, one of the signers of the ban treaty, made clear on Friday that it won’t be providing any cluster ammunition to Ukraine. But it expressed understanding for the American position.
“We’re certain that our U.S. friends didn’t take the decision about supplying such ammunition lightly,” German government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit told reporters in Berlin. “We need to remember once again that Russia has already used cluster ammunition at a large scale in its illegal war of aggression against Ukraine."
____ AP Diplomatic Writer Matthew Lee and Associated Press writers Geir Moulson, Tara Copp, Zeke Miller, Lorne Cook and Frank Jordans contributed to this report.