President Joe Biden’s decision to give Ukraine cluster munitions comes just as Kyiv faces “risk of failure” in their much-anticipated counteroffensive, according to Republican lawmakers who urge further weapons aid.
“The Biden administration cannot stop here,” said House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) in a joint statement with the top Senate Republicans overseeing U.S. diplomatic and defense policy. “This administration’s misguided fear of escalation in providing critical weapon systems … has only served to prolong the war, embolden Vladimir Putin, cost Ukrainian lives, and, indeed, put the entire Ukrainian counteroffensive at risk of failure.”
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The cluster munitions announcement is the latest example of Biden giving the green light to a weapons transfer after months of rebuffing Ukrainian requests. Yet that long-awaited shift gave immediate rise to renewed calls for Biden to send long-range missiles to Ukraine, which is using such munitions to strike Russian supply lines and arms depots.
“Without long-range weapons, it is difficult not only to fulfill an offensive mission but also to conduct a defensive operation,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday while traveling in the Czech Republic. “That is, the enemy has a distance advantage. That is why it is important, I would say, not only for offensive but also for defensive and offensive actions of our military.”
Still, Ukrainian officials have expressed far more optimism about the efficacy of their counteroffensive despite the lack of dramatic progress. Ukrainian Gen. Valerie Zaluzhni, the top commander of the Ukrainian armed forces, declared that “everything is going to plan” in a video released Friday following a trip to the front lines. Another senior Ukrainian commander claimed that Russia “is suffering eight times or even 10 times higher losses, especially with the number of killed troops.”
If that figure overstates the exchange, Ukrainian officials nonetheless have persuaded their partners that they are pursuing a methodical and effective battle plan to minimize their own casualties. “It takes time, at the moment, it takes time,” a senior European official told the Washington Examiner. “They are doing the counteroffensive at the moment with the [casualty] ratio [you would expect] if they would defend. So it takes time. Because they are going forward and then Russian doctrine [requires] that they counterattack the Ukrainians, and then they are losing.”
Still, Biden’s team, conscious of the criticism that “cluster munitions create a risk of civilian harm from unexploded ordnance,” characterized the transfer as a move to preempt a possible disaster.
“We’ve deferred the decision for as long as we could,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Friday. “But there is also a massive risk of civilian harm if Russian troops and tanks roll over Ukrainian positions and take more Ukrainian territory and subjugate more Ukrainian civilians because Ukraine does not have enough artillery. That is intolerable to us.”
Biden authorized the transfer of the bomblets, known as DPICMs in military jargon, for the stated purpose of ensuring that Ukrainian forces have enough artillery ammunition to continue their probe for a weak point in Russia’s fortifications. The Republican policymakers allowed that the cluster munitions “will allow the Ukrainian Armed Forces to target and eliminate Russian forces more efficiently, including in fortified positions on the battlefield,” but hastened to reiterate their support for Zelensky’s other requests.
“It is critical they also send ATACMS, which have a similar range to the Storm Shadow cruise missile the United Kingdom has already sent, and they must expedite the delivery of F-16s,” McCaul said alongside Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking member James Risch (R-ID), and his counterpart on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker (MS).
U.S. officials avoided questions about the long-range missiles, known as ATACMs, and kept the spotlight Thursday on their justification for allowing Ukrainian forces to have access to the cluster bombs.
“This is a war relating to munitions. And they’re running out of that ammunition, and we’re low on it,” Biden told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. “But the main thing is they either have the weapons to stop the Russians now — keep them from stopping the Ukrainian offensive through these areas — or they don’t. And I think they needed them.”
Biden and his team struck a defensive tone throughout the unveiling of that decision, as the transfer of the munitions is out of step with a treaty signed by 108 countries, including several members of NATO. The treaty emphasizes that “cluster munition remnants kill or maim civilians … [and] have other severe consequences that can persist for many years after use” due to the prevalence of bomblets that do not explode as intended.
“The Biden administration’s decision to transfer cluster munitions will contribute to the terrible casualties being suffered by Ukrainian civilians both immediately and for years to come,” Cluster Munition Coalition Vice Chairman Paul Hannon, a leading advocate for the elimination of the weapons, said Friday. “Russia and Ukraine’s use of cluster munitions is adding to Ukraine’s already massive contamination from explosive remnants and landmines.”
That treaty has been signed by neither the United States nor Ukraine, which hailed the transfer as a valuable new asset for the destruction of occupying Russian forces.
“It is important to note that the Russian Federation has been indiscriminately using cluster munitions from day 1 of the unprovoked large-scale aggression,” Ukrainian defense minister Oleksii Reznikov wrote on Twitter. “We need to liberate our temporarily occupied territories and save the lives of our people. For this we need to inflict losses on the enemy — war criminals, rapists and looters — who are occupying our territories. The more losses we inflict on them the more lives of Ukrainian people we will be able to save.”
Some major U.S. allies, such as France, acknowledged their own treaty obligations to renounce and discourage the cluster munitions, but otherwise offered only muted public opposition to the statement.
“Neither the United States nor Ukraine have signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions and are therefore not bound by its provisions,” a French Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Friday in a statement to the press. “We understand how the United States reached this decision in its wish to help Ukraine pursue its legitimate defense against Russia’s illegal aggression.”
The same clause of the treaty that requires each signatory “to make its best efforts to discourage” the use of cluster munitions by other states also stipulates that countries bound by the treaty “may engage in military cooperation and operations.”
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And another allied official who cited that clause signaled that Biden could face additional trans-Atlantic pressure to join the British in granting Zelensky’s request for long-range missiles.
“We’re therefore working with other countries to see who else might be able to position to provide more,” the NATO member-state official said. “I think that, despite what the Ukrainians can do without it, there’s always more [capabilities] that would be to their benefit, which is one of the reasons why they’re asking for it.”
