Biden says sending cluster bombs to Ukraine was ‘difficult decision’ – live

Here is the video of Pentagon official Colin Kahl speaking earlier today on the Biden administration’s decision to sent cluster bombs to Ukraine:

Kahl told reporters that the “urgency of the moment” demanded it, but also said: “We want to make sure that the Ukrainians have sufficient artillery to keep them in the fight in the context of the current counteroffensive, and because things are going a little slower than some had hoped.”

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr has joined the growing list of lawmakers and human rights groups condemning the Biden administration for its decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine.

“Cluster bombs are munitions so horrific for civilians that more than a hundred nations have signed an international treaty banning them. Now the Biden administration is preparing to send them to Ukraine,” Kennedy Jr tweeted on Friday.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has hailed the new US defense package which includes cluster munitions.

In a tweet on Friday, Zelenskiy said:

“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 of Ukraine’s defense capabilities will provide new tools for the de-occupation of our land and bringing peace closer.”

In an interview with CNN host Fareed Zakaria on Friday, president Joe Biden said that his decision to provide Ukraine with cluster munitions was a “difficult decision.”

“It was a very difficult decision on my part. And by the way, I discussed this with our allies, I discussed this with our friends up on the Hill,” Biden said, adding, “The Ukrainians are running out of ammunition.”

“This is a war relating to munitions. And they’re running out of that ammunition, and we’re low on it and so, what I finally did, I took the recommendation of the Defense Department to – not permanently – but to allow for this transition period, while we get more 155 weapons, these shells, for the Ukrainians.”

Despite over 100 countries having outlawed the munitions under the Convention on Cluster Munitions, the US and Ukraine are not signatories.

“They’re trying to get through those trenches and stop those tanks from rolling. But it was not an easy decision,” Biden said, adding, “We’re not signatories to that agreement, but it took me a while to be convinced to do it.”

“But the main thing is they either have the weapons to stop the Russians now – keep them from stopping the Ukrainian offensive through these areas – or they don’t. And I think they needed them.”

Here is an animation on how cluster bombs work:

As the Guardian’s Léonie Chao-Fung reports in her explainer piece on the weapon, “Cluster bombs, like landmines, pose a risk to civilians long after their use. Unexploded ordinance from cluster bombs can kill and maim people years or even decades after the munitions were fired.”

For the full explainer, click here:

Minnesota’s Democratic representative Ilhan Omar has issued a condemnation of the Biden administration’s decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine, saying, “Instead of dealing cluster munitions, we should be doing everything in our power to end their use.”

The statement continued:

“Cluster munitions are illegal under international law. A total of 123 countries have ratified the convention to ban their use under all circumstances—including nearly all our allies.

“It’s not hard to understand why. Because cluster bombs scatter multiple small bombs over a large area, they kill civilians both during an attack and after. I was recently in Vietnam where I heard firsthand how innocent civilians continue to be killed by US cluster munitions a full fifty years after the conflict ended. Tens of thousands of explosives are found every year there.

“We have to be clear: if the US is going to be a leader on international human rights, we must not participate in human rights abuses. We can support the people of Ukraine in their freedom struggle, while also opposing violations of international law. (In fact, the innocent victims of the cluster munitions will almost exclusively be Ukrainian civilians).”

Here’s a recap of today’s developments:

• The US will send cluster munitions to Ukraine as part of a new $800 military aid package, the Pentagon has confirmed. The package will include Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions (DPICMs), also known as cluster munitions, armored vehicles and air defense missiles. Ukraine has been asking for cluster munitions for months, but US officials have been hesitant as the weapons can kill indiscriminately over a wide area, threatening civilians.

• The White House said it had postponed the decision over whether to send the controversial weapons “for as long as we could” because of the risk of civilian harm from unexploded ordnance. National security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters that American cluster munitions had a “dud” rate of below 2.5%, which he described as far below Russia’s cluster munition dud rate.

• Human rights groups have condemned Joe Biden’s approval to send cluster munitions to Ukraine. At least 149 civilians were killed or injured worldwide by the weapon in 2021, according to the Cluster Munition Monitor. Biden also faced a backlash from within his own Democratic party.

• Ukraine’s counteroffensive is “slower than we hoped”, the US undersecretary of defense for policy, Colin H Kahl, said. He said one of the primary reasons behind the decision to send cluster munitions was because of the “urgency of the moment”, adding that the weapons would be delivered “in a timeframe that is relevant for the counteroffensive”.

• The US added 209,000 new jobs in June as hiring slowed amid signs that the economy is cooling. The rise was the weakest gain since December 2020, but the increase was also the 30th consecutive month of jobs gains, and the unemployment rate ticked down to the historically low rate of 3.6%.

• Treasury secretary Janet Yellen has arrived in Beijing on a four-day trip that aims to tame spiralling tensions between the world’s two largest economies, particularly over trade and the hi-tech chip industry. She will meet senior Chinese officials including the premier, Li Qiang, and former vice-premier and economics tsar Liu He, who is seen as close to China’s president, Xi Jinping, in her first day of talks on Friday.

• The team led by special counsel Jack Smith has indicated a continued interest in a chaotic meeting that took place in the Oval Office in the final days of the Trump administration, according to a CNN report. Investigators have reportedly questioned several witnesses before the grand jury and during interviews about the meeting, which took place about six weeks after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

• James Comer, chair of the house oversight committee, requested a Secret Service briefing after cocaine was found at the White House over the weekend. In a letter to Secret Service director, Kimberly Cheatle, the Kentucky Republican said his committee is “investigating the details surrounding the discovery of cocaine in the White House”.

• Florida governor Ron DeSantis said he plans to participate in the first Republican presidential debate in August, whether or not Donald Trump attends. “I’ll be there, regardless,” DeSantis said. Trump, who continues to be frontrunner in the GOP race, has not officially said whether he will skip the debate.

The Biden administration’s approval of the transfer of cluster munitions to Ukraine has sparked concern from human rights groups and some congressional lawmakers over the weapon’s ability to harm civilians, especially children, long after their use.

At least 38 human rights organizations have publicly opposed the transfer of cluster munitions to Ukraine, according to the Hill.

Sarah Yager, the Washington director at Human Rights Watch, said cluster bombs were already “all over” Ukraine and it is “not a good enough excuse for the United States to be sending more”. She added:

Legislators, policymakers and the Biden administration will probably think twice when the pictures start coming back of children who have been harmed by American-made cluster munitions.

Eric Eikenberry, the government relations director at Win Without War, said the adminstration’s argument that cluster munitions could help Ukraine advance and stop the Russian bombings was “speculative”.

He dismissed “the idea that these are going to be a huge boon, the counteroffensive is going to jet forward and we’re going to save lives in the aggregate because these are going to be the wonder weapons that flip the battlefield in our favor and takes Russian artillery out of commission.”

Here’s a clip of Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, who laid out the case for providing cluster munitions to Ukraine ahead of the Pentagon’s announcement.

Kahl says it is too early to judge how the Ukrainian counter offensive is going “because we are at the beginning of the middle”.

The counteroffensive is “slower than we had hoped” but the Ukrainians have a lot of combat power left, Kahl says.

He says the majority of the Ukrainian combat power “has not been brought to bear”.

What you’re seeing across the east and the south is the Ukrainians deliberately probing for weak spots.

The real test will be when they identify weak spots or create weak spots and generate a breach, how rapidly they’re able to exploit that with the combat power that they have in reserve, and how rapidly the Russians will be able to respond.

He says he believes the Ukrainians are doing their best but that the Russians “were more successful in digging in more deeply that perhaps was fully appreciated”.

Kahl does not specify how many rounds of cluster munitions that will be transferred to Ukraine.

He says the US has “hundreds of thousands that are available at this dud rate”, and that it believes that it has the ability to flow them into Ukraine to “keep them in the current fight” and to “build this bridge”.

Providing cluster munitions to Ukraine “gives them an extra arrow in their quiver”, Kahl says.

He says it is important for the Ukrainians to have a mix of capabilities, and that there is no one silver bullet.

On the subject of a timeline, he says he is going to be “a little circumspect” for operational security reasons, and that the US has been “pretty cautious about talking about specific timelines”. He adds:

The one thing I will say is they will deliver in a timeframe that is relevant for the counter offensive.

Secondly, Kahl says the US has substantially increased the production of 155m rounds, and that allies have also invested in their defense industrial base.

But the reality is that “we’re going to need to build a bridge to the point at which that capacity is sufficient, on a month to month basis, to keep the Ukrainians in the artillery fight”, he says.

He says he is “as concerned about the humanitarian circumstance” as anybody” but that the “worst thing for civilians and Ukraine is for Russia to win the war”.

Kahl says there are two primary reasons behind the decision to include cluster munitions in this latest weapons aid package to Ukraine.

One is the “urgency of the moment”, he says. Ukraine is in the midst of its counteroffensive which has been difficult because the Russians had six months to dig into defensive belts in the east and the south.

We want to make sure that the Ukrainians have sufficient artillery to keep them in the fight in the context of the current counter offensive, and because things are going a little slower than some had hoped.

The Ukrainian government has assured the US of the “responsible use” of DPICM, including that it will not use the rounds in civilian-populated urban environments, Kahl says.

Ukraine has also committed to post-conflict mining “to mitigate any potential harm to civilians”, he says.

He says Washington will work with Kyiv to “minimize the risks associated with the decision” to supply cluster munitions.

Kahl says Russian forces have been using cluster munitions “indiscriminately” since the start of its war in Ukraine. By contrast, Ukraine is seeking DPICM rounds “in order to defend its own sovereign territory”.

The US will be sending Ukraine its “most modern” dual-purpose improved conventional munition (DPICM) cluster munitions with “dud” rates to be under 2.35%, Kahl says.

He compares that to the cluster munitions used by Russia across Ukraine, which he says has dud rates of between 30% and 40%.

The undersecretary of defense for policy, Colin H Kahl, is speaking at a press briefing at the Pentagon.

The US will send a new weapons aid package worth about $800m, that will include 155m artillery rounds, including Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions, and 105mm artillery rounds.

Also included in the new package are additional munitions for Patriot air defence systems and ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket systems, additional Stryker armoured personnel carriers, precision aerial munitions, demolition munitions and systems for obstacle clearing and various spare parts and operational sustainment equipment.