Cluster munitions will be a “game-changer” for Ukrainian efforts to end the Russian invasion, according to the Ukrainian Minister of Defense. But the news was not received well in Russia.
Not all cluster munitions have the same failure rate. The dud rate in Ukraine will depend on how the submunitions are constructed and how long they’ve been in storage. UXO seems to be an explicit concern for the Biden administration. When announcing the transfer, Pentagon officialsthat they “would be carefully selecting rounds with lower dud rates, for which we have recent testing data.”
U.S. Army soldiers draw 155mm Base Burn Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munition rounds to carry into their vehicles during a load exercise at Camp Hovey, South Korea. To a certain extent, the die is cast. The U.S. already decided to send cluster munitions, and Ukrainians are set on using them to support their counteroffensive. Questions of UXO, friendly casualties and future harm to civilians will depend on how widely they are used, whether cluster manufacturers were honest about their dud rate, and how well Ukraine is able to disarm and remove the massive amount of unexploded ordinance littering the country’s north and east.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin—unable to stymie the delivery of the munitions—has been left to respond using the usual playbook—with lies and showboating. “It should be noted that Russia is armed with cluster munitions, as they say, for all occasions. At the same time, they are much more effective than American ones, their range is wider and more diverse,” Shoigu said this week, adding that Russian forces are taking “additional measures of an organizational and technical nature to protect personnel and equipment from striking elements of cluster munitions.
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