On Friday, foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said that the country opposes the United States sending cluster munitions after the Biden administration announced it was considering it.
According to Reuters, Germany is one of 111 states that are part of the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) and the organization also opposes the munitions which are widely denounced for killing and maiming civilians long after a war is over.
“I have followed the media reports. For us, as a state party, the Oslo agreement applies,” Baerbock told reporters in reference to the CCM treaty signed in December 2008. The US nor Ukraine are currently part of the treaty.
Human Rights Watch acting arms director Mary Wareham said, “Cluster munitions used by Russia and Ukraine are killing civilians now and will continue to do so for many years.” She continued, “Both sides should immediately stop using them and not try to get more of these indiscriminate weapons.”
She added, “The US government should not be providing cluster munitions to any country due to the foreseeable and lasting harm to civilians from these weapons.” She said, “Transferring cluster munitions disregards the substantial danger they pose to civilians and undermines the global effort to ban them.”
The Biden administration announced Friday that it was considering sending cluster munitions to Ukraine as part of an $800 million weapons package.
Ukraine has reportedly been asking for the munitions for months, but the US has been reluctant to give them over because their closest allies are part of the Convention on Cluster Munitions.
This is the latest in broken promises the Biden administration has made regarding the conflict in Ukraine. As Editor-in-Chief of Human Events Libby Emmons pointed out, in February 2022, then-White House press Secretary Jen Psaki said that Russia using the munitions “would potentially be a war crime.”
The US has previously supplied Ukraine with Abrams Tanks, and authorized G7 allies to send F-16 jets after initially saying that doing so would mean the start of World War III.
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