WASHINGTON, July 15 (Portal) – The cluster munitions Washington was recently reported to supply to Ukraine will not help Kiev immediately confront Russian forces, US officials and military analysts say, quoted by the New York Times on Friday.
“The magnitude of the effect will be modest,” said Jack Watling, senior researcher at the Royal United Services Institute in London. “This makes Ukrainian artillery a little more deadly. The real impact will be felt later in the year when Ukraine will have significantly more ammunition at its disposal,” the expert predicted.
For his part, US Undersecretary for Political Affairs Colin Kahl said cluster munitions would only allow Ukrainian soldiers to “maintain artillery combat for the foreseeable future.”
The newspaper recalled that in recent weeks senior US officials had “privately expressed their frustration” with the combat tactics of the Ukrainian army, which again focused on artillery shelling for fear of increasing casualties among its ranks “sticking to the western tactics” of combined arms.
“It looks like they’re back in an artillery duel,” said Amael Kotlarski, an operative with Defense Intelligence Janes. However, the Biden administration is not losing hope that the nine Ukrainian brigades trained by the US “prove that the American style of warfare is superior to the Russian one,” the newspaper writes.
“It pushes them a little bit out of their comfort zone because it gets them to use fire and maneuver in a way that’s more familiar to NATO forces than the kind of forces that have Soviet heritage and doctrine behind them,” explained Bald. “It requires them to fight in different ways,” he said.
Kahl also commented on the Ukrainian counter-offensive. “It’s slower than expected, but Ukrainians still have a lot of fighting power,” he said, assuring that a large proportion of Western-trained soldiers have not yet deployed to the battlefield.
“gesture of despair”
The US decision to provide cluster munitions drew criticism from the international community. One of those allegations came from International Committee of the Red Cross spokeswoman Fatima Sator, who condemned Washington’s decision, stressing that this type of weapon has “had serious humanitarian consequences for communities for many years”.
Russia also criticized the US decision to supply Ukraine with cluster bombs, calling it a “gesture of desperation”. In addition, various US allies refused to supply these ammunition, including Germany, Austria, Spain and Canada.
However, US Undersecretary for Political Affairs Colin Kahl tried to justify the shipment by saying that he was “as worried about the humanitarian circumstances as anyone, but the worst thing for civilians in Ukraine is that Russia wins the war. And that’s why.” It’s important that I don’t win it.
Cluster munitions were first used in World War II and can be used in rockets, bombs, missiles and artillery shells. Once fired, they open up in the air and scatter many mini-bombs over a large area.
Critics argue that these submunitions, if dispersed, can maim and kill civilians, compounded by the risk associated with unexploded shells that pose a hazard for years.
Because of the lethal effects of these weapons on civilians, 123 countries passed a convention banning the use of cluster bombs in 2008. Of these countries, 111 are part of the agreement and only 12 signatory states. (Text: RT News) (Photo: Gettyimages.ru)