The Ukrainian authorities have asked the United States to expand military assistance to include the contents of which Kyiv wants to use for drone attacks on Russian forces. This was told Reuters by congressmen from the Committee on the Armed Services of the US House of Representatives Jason Crowe and Adam Smith.
According to them, Kyiv has asked for MK-20 cluster bombs in addition to previously requested 155mm artillery cluster munitions. The MK-20 is usually dropped from aircraft, each such bomb expands in the air and releases more than 240 submunitions.
According to the agency, Ukrainian troops are going to drop from drones on enemy forces not the entire bomb, but only its submunitions. The Ukrainian military, according to Smith, believes that the MK-20 submunitions have better armor-piercing ability than the ammunition they drop from drones on Russian armored vehicles now.
With these bombs and Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions (DPICM, which fires 88 submunitions), Ukraine hopes to gain an advantage in its battles with Russia in the east of the country. Among other things, Kyiv considers cluster munitions as a way to deal with attacks by Russian troops, which send soldiers in waves to storm Ukrainian positions.
Crowe and Smith argue that in February at the Munich Security Conference, Ukrainian officials urged US officials to lobby for the transfer of cluster munitions. However, there is no certainty that the White House will agree to such supplies, Reuters notes.
Critics of the idea of supplying cluster munitions to Ukraine say that civilians may suffer if such bombs are used. In addition, they believe that the use of prohibited weapons will undermine the moral authority of Kyiv, which Russia can take advantage of.
In Ukraine, the agency’s message has not yet been commented on.
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Foreign Policy wrote that at the end of 2022, Turkey began sending cluster artillery munitions to Ukraine after the United States refused to supply these weapons. Representatives of the Ukrainian side denied.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba at the Munich Security Conference saidthat if Kyiv is provided with cluster munitions, these shells will only be used against the Russian army.
According to the report of the Cluster Munition Coalition, an international initiative group to combat cluster munitions, Ukraine is the only country in the world where cluster munitions were used in 2022. By July 1, human rights activists recorded that Russia had used such weapons in at least ten of Ukraine’s 24 regions. The Ukrainian military, according to the Cluster Munition Coalition, could use cluster munitions at least three times – in the Donetsk, Kharkiv and Kherson regions.
