President Biden Defends Controversial Decision to Send Cluster Bombs to Ukraine

President Joe Biden defended his controversial decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine in a Sunday morning interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.

“This is a war relating to munitions, and they’re running out of ammunitions,” Biden said of the Ukrainian armed forces. “They either have the weapons to keep the Russians from stopping the Ukrainian offensive…or they don’t. And I think they needed them.” Biden added that the move “was a very difficult decision on my part” and that he had “discussed this with our allies” and “our friends on the Hill.”

The bombs, banned by more than 100 countries, including many U.S. allies, are designed to break apart midair and detonate upon impact, but historically have had an extremely high failure rate. Cluster munitions that fail to explode initially can detonate years later, and have often caused indiscriminate harm to civilians. In the years since World War II, this type of weapon has killed between 56,5000 and 86,500 civilians worldwide, The New York Times reported.

The munitions transfer is part of an $800 million military package the Pentagon announced on Friday, intended to boost the progress of Ukraine’s flagging summer counteroffensive. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky called the aid package “timely, broad, and much-needed.”

The decision immediately drew backlash from Democratic lawmakers. On Friday, a group of 19 House progressives issued a letter condemning the weapons. “The U.S. history of using cluster munitions — particularly the legacy of long-term harm to civilians in Southeast Asia — should prevent us from repeating the mistakes of our past,” they wrote.

Human rights groups also condemned the announced weapons transfer. Amnesty International described cluster munitions as “a grave threat to civilian lives, even long after the conflict has ended.” “There’s just not a responsible way to use cluster munitions,” Brian Castner, the weapons expert on Amnesty International’s Crisis Response Team, told The New York Times.

A recent Human Rights Watch report found that, in 2022, Ukrainian forces “used cluster munitions that caused numerous deaths and serious injuries to civilians.” HRW has also documented hundreds of civilian deaths caused by Russia’s use of the weapon. ​​“Both sides should immediately stop using them and not try to get more of these indiscriminate weapons,” argued Mary Wareham, acting arms director at HRW.

In his Sunday interview, Biden echoed an argument made by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Friday: that the cluster bombs the U.S. is sending Ukraine have a very low failure rate compared to the ones Russia has been using, which Sullivan said has failure rates between 30 and 40%. Sullivan also said that “Ukraine is committed to post-conflict de-mining efforts to mitigate any potential harm to civilians, and this will be necessary regardless of whether the United States provides these munitions or not, because of Russia’s widespread use of cluster munitions.”

“We deferred the decision for as long as we could,” Sullivan said Friday, acknowledging the risk of “civilian harm from unexploded ordnance.” “But there is also a massive risk of civilian harm if Russian troops and tanks roll over Ukrainian positions and take more Ukrainian territory and subjugate more Ukrainian civilians because Ukraine does not have enough artillery,” he argued.

Saturday marked the 500th day of the Russian invasion.