The Biden administration will supply Ukraine with controversial anti-personnel mines in its war against Russia, a US official confirmed to CBS News on Tuesday evening.
Anti-personnel mines, or APLs, are designed to be used against people, not vehicles. They can be deployed quickly and are intended to slow the advance of ground forces, making them useful for defending Ukraine against Russian advances in eastern Ukraine, the official said.
The US sought commitments from the Ukrainians on their use to further reduce the risk to civilians, the official said, noting that the Ukrainians are committed not to use the mines in areas populated by their own citizens.
The US-supplied APLs differ from the thousands of landmines Russia uses in eastern Ukraine in that they are “non-persistent,” meaning they become inert over a predetermined period of time, usually between four hours and two weeks , the official said. said. They are electrically fused and require battery power to explode. Once the battery runs out, they don’t explode.
Tuesday marked the thousand days since Russia invaded Ukraine. CBS News learned on Sunday that President Biden restrictions had been lifted about Ukraine’s use of American weapons to carry out attacks deep inside Russia.
US-supplied ATACMS used on Tuesday about targets in Russia, US officials confirmed to CBS News.
Ukraine was one of them the countries with the most mines in the world since the Russian invasion in 2022, and Ukraine is being flooded with APLs. They are known by deceptively innocuous names such as ‘butterfly mines’ or ‘petal mines’ because they spread like petals as they fall from the sky.
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“Typically, several hundred of these would be spread liberally and indiscriminately across the territory at a time,” Pete Smith, the Ukrainian program manager for the HALO Trust, a nonprofit focused on clearing war zones of landmines, told 60 Minutes in August. “They can rest on the roofs. They can sit in the gutters. It can take years before they come back into society and into the public eye.”
To date, 164 countries, including Ukraine, have signed the Mine Ban Treaty, which bans the use of APLs. However, three dozen countries have not agreed to it, including Russia and the US
In January 2020, then-President Donald Trump reversed an Obama-era policy that banned the use of APLs everywhere except the Korean Peninsula. However, in June 2022, Mr. Biden reinstated the ban, with the exception of APLs “necessary for the defense of the Republic of Korea.”
contributed to this report.
