Biden administration allowing Ukraine to use anti-personnel mines: Austin
The Biden administration will allow Ukraine to use anti-personnel land mines to mitigate Russia's battlefield progress, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Wednesday, as reported by The Associated Press. “The land mines that we would look to provide them would be land mines that are not persistent, you know, we can control when they would self-activate,...
The Biden administration will allow Ukraine to use anti-personnel land mines to mitigate Russia's battlefield progress, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Wednesday, as reported by The Associated Press.
“The land mines that we would look to provide them would be land mines that are not persistent, you know, we can control when they would self-activate, self-detonate and that makes it far more safer eventually than the things that they are creating on their own,” Austin said, referring to how nonpersistent land mines generally need batteries, making them unable to detonate over time, as reported by AP.
Russia has already been using land mines in Ukraine. Anti-personnel land mines have faced pushback from charities and activists due to their "lingering threat" to civilians, AP said.
The announcement comes amid President Biden’s approval for the use of Western-provided long-range missiles by Ukraine to strike targets within Russia, which enraged Russia and riled allies of Trump, who has previously been somewhat critical of Ukraine. On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to end the war in a day.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on Monday referred to comments by Russian President Vladimir Putin in September that warned Moscow would view the U.S. and NATO in direct conflict with Russia if the U.S. granted permission to Ukraine to use missiles from the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) far-beyond Russia’s borders to hit targets.
“If this decision is taken, it will mean nothing less than the direct involvement of NATO countries, the United States and European countries in the war in Ukraine,” Putin said at the time.
The approval by Austin on Wednesday also follows Putin's decision to lower the threshold for nuclear weapons use, which came just days after Biden's announcement to use long-range missiles inside Russia. Any aggression from a nonnuclear state with the support of a nuclear state will be treated as a joint attack on Russia, according to the update.
