DM Monitoring
MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin said his country had enough cluster munitions to answer if Ukraine was to use the weapons, in an interview published on Sunday.
Ukraine started receiving cluster weapons from the United States, a move that sparked concerns due to the long-term risk posed to civilians by bomblets that fail to explode.
“Russia has a sufficient stockpile of various kinds of cluster munitions,” Putin told a state-television journalist.
The controversial weapons can disperse up to several hundred small explosive charges, which can remain unexploded in the ground.
“If they are used against us, we reserve ourselves the right to tit-for-tat actions,” Putin said. He added Russia had not yet used the weapons despite a “certain shortage of munitions at some point”.
Human Rights Watch and Ukrainian forces have accused Russia of already using cluster munitions on the battlefield. They are banned by numerous countries — notably in Europe — that are signatories to a 2008 Oslo Convention, to which neither Russia, the United States nor Ukraine are parties.
Humanitarian groups have strongly condemned the US decision to supply cluster munitions to Ukraine.
US President Joe Biden said the decision was “very difficult” but stressed Ukraine needed extra ammunition to refill its depleted stocks.
On the other hand. US President Joe Biden said Thursday that Russia’s Vladimir Putin has already lost the war in Ukraine, expressing hope that Kyiv’s counter-offensive would force Moscow to the negotiating table.
As Russia launched fresh strikes and a new bout of nuclear-sabre rattling, Biden said there was no real prospect of Putin using nuclear weapons and insisted the war would not drag on for years.
Biden also used a visit to Finland, NATO’s newest member, to pledge that Ukraine would one day join the alliance, despite NATO leaders failing to give Kyiv a timeline at a key summit this week.
“Putin’s already lost the war. Putin has a real problem,” Biden told a press conference with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto. “There is no possibility of him winning the war in Ukraine.”
NATO leaders had dashed Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky’s hopes for a clear timeline to join the military alliance, saying at this week’s summit in Vilnius that they would offer an invite only when “conditions are met”.
But while Biden said no country could become a NATO member while it was at war — with Ukraine joining now meaning a “third world war” — he vowed Kyiv would one day join the club.
