The United States will provide Ukraine with depleted uranium munitions effective against tanks and armored vehicles, the Pentagon announced on Wednesday, AFP reports.
The 120 mm caliber ammunition is intended for the American Abrams battle tanks promised to Kyiv as part of a new tranche of military aid worth $175 million, according to a Pentagon press release.
Although Britain sent depleted uranium munitions to Ukraine earlier this year, this will be the first shipment of US munitions and is likely to spark controversy. This happened after the decision of the Biden administration to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions, despite concerns about the danger posed by such weapons to the civilian population, Reuter comments.
The use of depleted uranium munitions is hotly debated, with opponents such as the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons arguing that consuming or inhaling dust from depleted uranium poses serious health risks, including the risk of cancer and birth defects.
A byproduct of uranium enrichment, depleted uranium, is used in munitions because its extreme density gives projectiles the ability to easily penetrate armor and ignite spontaneously.
The United States used depleted uranium munitions in massive quantities during the 1990 and 2003 Gulf Wars and during the 1999 NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia.
Since the beginning of the large-scale invasion, international partners have already provided Ukraine with military aid in the amount of about $100 billion, of which almost $60 billion came from the United States alone, Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said in an interview with Ukrinform, Ukrainian Pravda reports. .
“If we count and estimate all the aid packages today, I think we’ve already received about $100 billion in a full-scale invasion.”
Reznikov clarified that this money is only for weapons and military equipment.
“We received more than 100 billion dollars of various weapons and equipment, cartridges, projectiles. “We received more than 50 billion dollars from the US alone, approaching 60 billion,” he said, adding that it was “trillions of hryvnias.”
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Source: Hot News
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