The Biden administration is expected to announce Friday that the United States will provide cluster munitions to Ukraine, according to several administration and defense officials, a controversial move to boost the country’s military in its fight against entrenched Russian forces.
President Joe Biden signed a presidential waiver on the arms transfer in recent days, two officials said.
Dual Purpose Enhanced Conventional Munitions, or DPICMs, are surface-to-surface warheads that explode and disperse multiple small munitions or bombs over wide areas, causing more widespread destruction than single rounds. The projectiles can be charges that penetrate armored vehicles, or they can break or fragment to be more dangerous to people.
Some human rights groups oppose their use due to concerns that unexploded bomblets, or duds, could explode after battle, potentially injuring or killing innocent civilians.
Ukraine has been applying to the US for DPICM since last year, but the idea met with resistance due to an international treaty that prohibits the transfer, use and storage of the weapon.
The US, Ukraine and Russia are not signatories to the treaty, called the Convention on Cluster Munitions, but US law requires the president to sign a waiver before exporting cluster munitions with a failure rate greater than 1 %. The DPICMs that the US would provide have an error rate of 1.3% to 2.35%.
The United States has a stockpile of about 10,000 cluster munitions in Europe that could be shipped to Ukraine almost immediately, the officials said.
NBC News reported last week that the Biden administration was leaning towards providing the weapons to Ukraine.
The US developed cluster munitions during the Cold War and then stockpiled large numbers of them, many of which are nearing the end of their useful lives. Last week, a bipartisan group of members of Congress sent a letter calling on the Biden administration to release the “great untapped arsenal” in Ukraine.
DPICMs can be fired from artillery systems that the US has already provided to Ukraine.
Worldwide, civilians accounted for 97% of all cluster munition casualties, according to a report in August by Landmine and Cluster Munitions Monitor, a campaign group working to eradicate their use. Children accounted for 66% of all victims where the age group was known, according to the report.
Its use by both sides has been documented during the war in Ukraine, according to Human Rights Watch, an international non-governmental organization. It is unknown how many people the munitions have killed or what area might have been affected, but Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said in April that more than 67,000 square miles of the country had been destroyed by unexploded ordnance.
