The US will soon provide Ukraine with antipersonnel land mines to shore up its defenses against Russian forces, a US official said late on Tuesday.
The decision comes as US President Joe Biden works to boost Ukraine’s war effort in the final two months of his administration, before Ukraine aid critic US president-elect Donald Trump takes power in January.
On Sunday, Biden gave Ukraine the green light to fire US-supplied long-range missiles into Russian territory for the first time.
Photo: AFP
The US official added that Washington has sought commitments from Ukraine to use the mines in its own territory and only in areas that are not populated to decrease the risk they pose to civilians.
The mines are known as being “nonpersistent,” because they go inert after a set period of time, when their battery power runs out.
Trump has repeatedly promised to end the war quickly, but has not provided details of how he would do so.
With Russia gaining ground and increasing talk of negotiations, Ukraine is wary of being at a disadvantage when it comes to hashing out a peace settlement.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Tuesday told US television network Fox News that Ukraine will lose the war if the US pulls its funding to Kyiv.
Meanwhile, Russia on Tuesday said that it would respond after Ukraine fired longer-range US missiles at its territory for the first time, as Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a nuclear threat on the 1,000th day of the war.
A senior official said that a strike on Russia’s Bryansk region earlier on Tuesday “was carried out by ATACMS” (Army Tactical Missile System) supplied by the US.
Speaking 1,000 days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov said the attack showed Western countries wanted to “escalate” the conflict.
“We will be taking this as a qualitatively new phase of the Western war against Russia. And we will react accordingly,” Lavrov told a news conference at the G20 summit in Brazil.
Putin signed a decree on Tuesday lowering the threshold for using nuclear weapons, a move that the White House, UK and EU condemned as “irresponsible.”
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