The United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Spain have called upon U.S. President Joe Biden to not send cluster bombs to Ukraine amid concerns over the danger they pose to civilian populations.
As Ukraine marked over 500 days since the invasion by Russian forces, significant challenges have been levied against the war strategy of the Biden administration from its NATO allies in Europe, with both the British and Spanish governments urging Washington to back down from its pledge to send cluster bombs into the conflict.
Both the UK and Spain are signatories of the International Convention on Cluster Munitions, which prohibits the use, manufacturing, stockpiling or transfer of the weapon type, however, key holdouts of the treaty are the United States, Ukraine and Russia. Cluster munitions, which are banned by over 100 countries, are a type of rocket, bomb, missile and other projectiles that explode mid-air to rain down on a large area. They have a high risk of failure, which could lead to them landing on ground, only to explode at a later time.
President Joe Biden, 80, justified his “very difficult” decision to send the deadly weapons to Ukraine as the country is “running out of ammunition” and the United States is running low on the 155-millimetre artillery shells to resupply the Ukrainian forces. Therefore, Biden said, the U.S. would provide cluster munitions for a “transition period”, while claiming that they will not be used in civilian areas but merely to break through the entrenched positions of the Russian forces.
This explanation apparently did little in the way of assuaging NATO allies in London and Madrid, however, with both governments asking the Democrat administration to back down.