French-Made Geneva Convention-Violating Mines Found in Donbass: Russian MoD

France sent over €1.6 billion in military equipment to Ukraine before the February escalation, and hundreds of millions of euros more worth of weapons since the spring, including MILAN anti-tank systems, Mistral MANPADS, and CAESAR howitzers. President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly called on Paris to stop the flow of French arms to Kiev.

Russian troops have discovered French-made heavy anti-tank mines in recently liberated areas outside the city of Artyomovsk in the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Russian Ministry of Defense has announced.

“On August 14, in an area south of Artyomovsk…at positions abandoned by units of the 72nd Mechanized Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Russian military personnel discovered more than 50 French-made EMP F2 anti-tank mines,” MoD spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in a briefing Tuesday.

“These mines, after being deployed in combat position, cannot be removed or defused. Their use is a direct violation of Protocol II ‘On Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices’ under the Geneva Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons,” Konashenkov said.

The protocol, to which France and Ukraine are both signatories, prohibits the use and transfer of non-detectable anti-personnel mines, as well as non-self-destructing and non-self-deactivating mines outside fenced, monitored, and specially marked areas, and demands that all mines be detectable using common detection equipment for safe removal at the end of a conflict.

Last month, the Ukrainian military reported that Paris had sent Kiev HPD-2A2s – an electronically fused anti-armor landmine, equipped with "anti-handling devices," including motion and mine detector signals to prevent them from being safely disabled.

France is one of several NATO members whose military aid to Ukraine has included landmines, with others including Denmark, Estonia, Germany, and the United States.

Russian and Donbass forces have also accused Kiev of using PFM-1 Lepestok antipersonnel mines throughout the Donbass – deploying them using multiple rocket launchers which disperse them randomly across cities and rural areas, where they have already caused dozens of civilian deaths and injuries.

The United States, France, and other Western countries have sent tens of billions of dollars’ worth of military assistance to Ukraine since the escalation of the crisis in February. Russia has repeatedly warned the West of the consequences of doing so, including the potential to further escalate the crisis and diminish the chances for peace talks, as well as feeding international illegal arms dealers.

Last week, CBS News posted and then deleted a documentary which found that just “30%” of Western military assistance to Kiev was reaching the front lines after being reprimanded by the Pentagon.

In early August, Sputnik Arabic got an inside look at the nitty-gritty details of Ukrainian weapons smuggling operations by contacting an arms merchant on the dark web willing to ship thousands of US-made assault rifles to Yemen.