U.S. President Joe Biden has lifted restrictions on attacking Ukraine from the Russian mainland by the AeTax missile, and this time even allowed the use of anti-personnel landmines.
The Washington Post reported on the 19th local time, citing two officials, that "President Biden has approved the supply of anti-personnel mines to Ukraine."
President Biden banned the use of anti-personnel landmines outside the Korean Peninsula in June 2022.
The U.S. policy banning the use of anti-personnel mines outside the Korean Peninsula, which was implemented in 2014 under the Barack Obama administration, was abolished in January 2020 during the first term of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's presidency, but President Biden kept it alive again.Officials in the U.S.
argued that the mines supplied this time are a "non-persistent" type of self-explosion or battery discharge, reducing the risk to civilians.
In addition, Ukrainian authorities have promised not to bury the landmines in densely populated areas, according to the Washington Post.
But disarmament experts refute that non-persistent landmines are also unsafe.
Mary Wareham, deputy director of human rights group Human Rights Watch, condemned the Biden administration's decision as "shocking" and said "even non-persistent mines pose a risk to civilians, are complicated to cleanly dismantle, and are not reliably deactivated."
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