Bucking arms-control advocates, powerful human-rights groups, certain European officials, and foreign-policy progressives within the Democratic Party, President Biden opted to transfer cluster munitions to Ukraine earlier today. They will be delivered as part of his administration’s 42nd tranche of security assistance delivered to Ukrainian forces.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky thanked Biden this afternoon:
A timely, broad and much-needed defense aid package from the United States. We are grateful to the American people and President Joseph Biden @POTUS for decisive steps that bring Ukraine closer to victory over the enemy, and democracy to victory over dictatorship. The expansion…
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) July 7, 2023
The ammunition in question, dual-purpose improved conventional munition (DPICM), releases dozens of grenades contained within each shell. That makes it extraordinarily effective at targeting specific areas with concentrated groups of enemy troops, but unexploded bomblets that remain are capable of harming civilians, including after the conflict ends.
The move was therefore controversial among certain groups and officials due to concerns that the use of the cluster munitions would litter Ukraine’s landscape with unexploded ordnance that would kill civilians for years to come, even after the end of the war. Others, meanwhile, including the Ukrainian government and congressional Republicans, had for months urged Biden to transfer the ammunition, arguing that Kyiv needs every weapon in its arsenal to win the war — and that the consequences of Russian occupation are far worse than those wrought by cluster munitions, which will be used against Russian military positions and not civilian centers anyway.
But the president has revealed that, at the end of the day, his decision came down to the fact that “the Ukrainians are running out of ammunition.”
In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, he cast his decision as “difficult” but said: “This is a war relating to munitions. And they’re running out of that ammunition, and we’re low on it.” The 155 mm ammunition that Washington has been transferring to Ukraine is in short supply, Biden said.
Biden added that the decision to transfer the cluster munitions was “to allow for this transition period, while we get more 155-millimeter weapons, these shells for the Ukrainians.”
The U.S. Army is in the process of dramatically scaling up production of 155-millimeter shells, but Biden’s comments show that serious production gaps remain. And for Biden, that, taken with the Ukrainian counteroffensive’s slow gains, mattered more in the end than the concerns raised by progressive-leaning nonprofit groups and German officials.