“We don’t understand why the governments of Afghanistan, Yemen, and Mali are called upon by the West to agree with the opposition, even with extremists in certain situations. And in regard to the Ukrainian crisis, they act differently by factually indulging Kiev’s military operation clear up to justifying or attempting to justify the use of cluster munitions,” Lavrov said.
US senators have repeatedly called on President Barack Obama to provide Ukrainian authorities with lethal assistance. On Thursday, US Senator John McCain, who serves as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, told Sputnik that Ukraine would not have needed to use cluster weapons if Washington had provided Kiev with other weapons.
In October last year, the Human Rights Watch reported that cluster munition had been used in populated areas of Ukraine’s conflict-torn Donbas region, with circumstances suggesting that government forces were responsible for the attacks.
Earlier this week, the use of such weapons in Donbas was reported again, this time by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. The organization’s monitors in the region assessed that damage to buildings from shelling in late January was consistent with that typically caused by shrapnel elements from cluster weapons.
Cluster munition is a type of explosive weapon that contains and releases large numbers of smaller submunitions over a wide area, making it highly imprecise.
While signatory to the Mine Ban Treaty of 1997, which does not cover all types of cluster weapons, Ukraine has refrained from signing the UN’s Convention on Cluster Munitions of 2008.
