Key Points
- President Vladimir Putin said Russia had a "sufficient stockpile" of cluster bombs.
- He said Russia reserves the right to use them if they were deployed against Russians.
- Putin said he regards the use of such weapons as a crime.
President Vladimir Putin said Russia had a "sufficient stockpile" of cluster bombs and reserved the right to use them if such munitions, the use of which he said he regarded as a crime, were deployed against Russian forces in Ukraine.
Ukraine said on Thursday it had received cluster bombs from the United States, its biggest military backer, which says the munitions are needed to compensate for shell shortages faced by Kyiv's forces at a time when they are mounting a counteroffensive.
Cluster munitions are banned in more than 100 countries because they typically release large numbers of smaller bomblets that can kill indiscriminately over a wide area. Some of them inevitably fail to explode and can pose a danger for decades, particularly to children.
Kyiv has said it will use cluster bombs to dislodge concentrations of enemy soldiers when trying to take back its own territory, but will not use them on Russian territory.
Putin told state TV Moscow would respond in kind if necessary.
"I want to note that in the Russian Federation there is a sufficient stockpile of different kinds of cluster bombs. We have not used them yet. But of course if they are used against us, we reserve the right to take reciprocal action."
Putin said he regarded the use of cluster bombs as a crime and that Russia had so far not needed to use them itself despite having suffered its own ammunition issues in the past.
Human Rights Watch says both Moscow and Kyiv have used cluster munitions. Russia, Ukraine and the US have not signed up to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans the production, stockpiling, use and transfer of the weapons.
Putin also told state TV he saw nothing wrong in Russian specialists examining captured Western military equipment and missiles, such as the Storm Shadow missiles Britain supplied to Ukraine, in order to see if there was anything useful that could be used in Russia's own military hardware.
What is a cluster bomb?
In the treaty, a cluster munition is defined in Article 2 to include the container and submunitions attached.
The munition is delivered via a rocket or missile from the air or the ground. That action releases bomblets in mid-air over a wide area.
Some of the bomblets detonate on impact, but the danger lies in the unexploded bomblets that can go off at a future date - even decades later. The United Nations says it is reported that up to 40 per cent of cluster munitions do not explode on impact.
The Cluster Munition Monitor carries out monitoring of the international treaty's implementation. In their 2022 report, they found 35 signatory countries had destroyed 99 per cent of their cluster munition stockpiles. That amounted to 1.5 million cluster munition stockpiles, comprising 178 million sub-munitions.
The report also noted Russia's extensive use of the internationally banned weapon, causing at least 689 reported civilian casualties in the first half of 2022. That is a 300 per cent increase on the 2021 global total.
Why are human rights groups concerned about cluster munitions?
Cluster munitions are on the list of weapons banned under international humanitarian law on armed conflict, which also includes exploding and expanding bullets, chemical weapons, biological weapons, anti-personnel mines, weapons using undetectable fragments and blinding lasers.
Human Rights Watch urged both Ukraine, Russia and the United States to stop using or distributing cluster munitions, saying the use of the weapon in civilian areas could possibly be a war crime.
