One European country is seeking to supply Ukraine’s armed forces with cluster bombs because it believes the highly controversial weapon, whose use has been criticized by Russia, will be useful on the battlefield, an official said Wednesday.

The representative of the European government, speaking on the condition that neither he nor his country be named, explained that his government had already approved the delivery and had now taken the initiative to obtain the consent of Germany, the state involved in the production, and therefore had to give permission . for their re-export.

Earlier Wednesday, Berlin officially announced that it would send and agree to send other governments heavy tanks for the Ukrainian army, whose leadership has been insistently asking for them for several months.

Cluster munitions consist of a carrier (bomb, projectile), inside of which are so-called submunitions dispersed over a large area. By their very nature, anything but precision-guided weapons is responsible for countless civilian deaths.

Their use and transfer were theoretically prohibited by the Oslo Convention (2008), which was signed by most Western countries.

But the Kremlin did not sign the convention, and the UN repeatedly expressed serious concern about the use of such weapons in populated areas after the Russian military invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

Cluster bombs have improved, the European official said, and the West should look “to the future” in terms of supporting Kyiv, that is, supplying weapons capable of preventing any Russian military advance.

“The Ukrainians are asking for them. These are legal weapons. Collateral losses are not so great anymore. They were especially great in the 1940s and 1950s, today they are much more manageable,” a European official said during his visit to Washington.

“The Russians have used weapons of all kinds that are 100 times worse than cluster bombs,” he added, adding that Ukraine “must win the war.”

However, getting the approval of the German government could take some time, he acknowledged.

Source: RES-IPE