Meanwhile, somewhere over to the east.
Importantly:-"In case you missed it: Cluster munitions provided by the United States have now arrived in Ukraine, the Pentagon confirmed on Thursday.The munitions – bombs that open in the air and release scores of smaller bomblets – are seen by the US as a way to get Kyiv critically needed ammunition to help bolster its offensive and push through Russian frontlines. US leaders debated the thorny issue for months, before President Joe Biden made the final decision last week.US leaders have said the US will send a version of the munition that has a reduced “dud rate”, meaning fewer of the smaller bomblets fail to explode. These unexploded rounds, which often litter battlefields and populated civilian areas, cause unintended deaths. US officials said Washington will provide thousands of the rounds, but provided no specific numbers." (Guardian today).Meanwhile, from a Popular Mechanics article of 4 months ago, via Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies King's College London, on Twitter:-"Ukraine is almost certainly the country most contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnances in the world. While large parts of Ukraine have been liberated, and the frontline is now far away from most major cities, these deadly remnants of war remain all over the country’s former battlegrounds, endangering innocent civilians.""The most dangerous thing is cluster munitions, no pattern to the way they fall, and some go off and some don’t. They have up to a 30 percent failure rate""In Ukraine, there are 105,000 square kilometers that need to be checked for contamination. “To clear the country completely,” [de-mining team leader] Napier says, “it would cost billions of dollars and probably take forever. In France, they are still pulling stuff up from the Second World War. The threat will remain, and people will start to live with it.” His colleagues said that “despite tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, they’d never seen anything as bad as Kharkiv. Other regions, like Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, they will all be the same.”https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a43326213/demining-unexploded-ordnance-in-ukraine/
David Ainsworth ● 1213d2 Comments ● 1213d