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WASHINGTON and BELFAST — When NATO leaders gather in Vilnius, Lithuania next week, US President Joe Biden is expected to bring along a plan to deliver controversial cluster munitions to Ukraine.
But not all allies and partners are on board, setting up a potential series of awkward interactions.
The pending decision, expected to be announced later today, will clear the way to deliver 155-mm dual-purpose improved conventional munitions (DPICMs) to Kyiv for its forces to fire from existing artillery launchers. Advocates of the move say the weapons could help mitigate an artillery round shortage, while providing an effective mode of attack against larger Russian formations. However, concerns about the weapons high failure rates and civilian risk make them hotly contested and banned in many countries including Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.
Ahead of the expected announcement, Reuters reported that German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said she opposes sending cluster munitions to Ukraine, while NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg asserted that the alliance as a whole will not weigh in.
“A number of allies have signed the convention but a number of allies have not signed the convention and it is for individual allies to make decisions on the delivery of weapons and military supplies to Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said. “So, this will be for governments to decide, not for NATO as an alliance.”
“We have to remember that this brutality is also reflected by the fact that everyday we see casualties from cluster munitions on both sides,” he later added. “Russia [uses] cluster munitions in their war of aggression to invade another country, while Ukraine is using them] to defend itself.”
US officials have not disclosed what level of buy-in they’ve received from other countries, especially those who have signed onto the treaty, but the White House seems to align with Stoltenberg’s “both sides” argument to help justify their position. Previewing the forthcoming decision for Breaking Defense on June 30, a US official said that since Ukraine and Russia are both using similar cluster munitions throughout the conflict, there is already a need to “clean up” the unexploded ordinances scattered about.
Like traditional artillery rounds, DPICMs are surface-to-surface weapons. However, the warheads are designed to explode and then disperse smaller munitions, that themselves are designed to explode over a wider area.
“What DPICMs bring to a battlefield is anti-armor and anti-personnel capability,” Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters Thursday. “So, essentially it can be either loaded with shape charges, which are armor penetrating, or they can be loaded with fragmentary munitions, which are anti-personnel.
“So clearly, a capability that would be useful in any type of offensive operations,” he added.
However, those weapons have a higher rate of failure and do not always explode. When that happens, civilians are at increased risk of death or injury if they accidentally stumble upon them and trigger an explosion.
That risk prompted 123 states to eventually sign onto the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions banning the weapon. The United States, Russia and Ukraine are among the countries that have not signed the treaty.
However, US leaders have also moved to halt the spread of those controversial weapons. For example, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2010 and 2019 limited Washington from transferring cluster munitions unless the submunitions failure rate is below 1 percent, a figure below the Pentagon’s assessment for the weapons bound for Ukraine.
The Biden administration is planning to send Kyiv newer variants that have a 2.35 percent failure rate, or below, based on test data as recent as 2020, Ryder said.
“We are aware of reports out there from several decades ago that indicate that certain 155-mm DPICMs have higher dud rates, so we would be carefully selecting rounds with lower dud rates,” the one-star general added.
This story will be updated as new information becomes available.
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