KYIV — The White House said it will provide Ukraine with anti-personnel mines to help it fend off Russia’s battlefield advances, which are gaining momentum in the east of the country, despite widespread opposition to such weapons by international rights groups.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was quoted on November 20 by news agencies as saying during a visit to Laos that the decision to provide the controversial mines was made because of a change in Russian tactics.
“They don’t lead with their mechanized forces anymore,” he said “They lead with dismounted forces who are able to close and do things to kind of pave the way for mechanized forces.”
Ukraine has a need “for things that can help slow down that effort on the part of the Russians,” he added.
Rights and humanitarian groups have long criticized the use of anti-personnel mines, saying they pose a danger to civilians.
In a statement following the U.S. announcement, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the “decision to transfer antipersonnel land mines risks civilian lives and sets back international efforts to eradicate these indiscriminate weapons.”
More than 160 nations have agreed to ban the use of anti-personnel mines, although the United States and Russia are not signatories to the convention. Ukraine ratified the convention in December 2005.
When asked in the past about its use of such mines, Ukraine said it couldn’t comment on the types of weapons used during the current armed conflict “before the end of the war and the restoration of our sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
HRW said Russia has used at least 13 types of anti-personnel mines in Ukraine since February 2022.
“Russia has used antipersonnel land mines widely in Ukraine…causing hundreds of casualties and contaminating vast tracts of agricultural land,” HRW said.
Anti-personnel mines are hidden in the ground and are designed to detonate when enemy troops walk on or near them.
Some reports have said the mines being provided by Washington are “nonpersisent,” meaning they no longer are operational after a set period of time.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy hailed the decision on the mines, calling them “very important” weapons in the effort to blunt Russian assaults and saying the move would “totally strengthen” Ukraine’s frontline troops.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials said Washington’s embassy in Kyiv will likely resume normal operations on November 21 after having closed earlier on November 20 when it received “specific information” about “a potential significant air strike.”
Late in the day, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told a briefing that “I can’t go into the details of the threat, but we’re always keeping a close eye on it.
“The embassy is expected to return to normal operations tomorrow,” he added.
In closing, the embassy urged employees and U.S. citizens in the Ukrainian capital to take immediate shelter if an air-raid alert was announced.
“Out of an abundance of caution, the Embassy will be closed, and Embassy employees are being instructed to shelter in place,” it said in a statement, without giving any details about the possible strike.
The embassies of Italy, Greece, and Spain said they had also shut their operations following the unusual U.S. warning. Spain later said it reopened its facility after a temporarily closing.
The Ukrainian military suggested the information the U.S. Embassy was referring to was “fake.”
“Messengers and social networks…are spreading a message about the threat of a ‘particularly massive’ missile and bomb attack on Ukrainian cities today.”
“This message is a fake. It contains grammatical errors typical of Russian information and psychological operations,” it added.
It urged residents not to ignore air-raid sirens but also “not to succumb to panic.”
An air-raid alert was issued for several Ukrainian regions, including Kyiv, early on November 20 due to the imminence of Russian drone strikes.
The U.S. warning came one day after Moscow said Ukraine had used U.S.-made long-range missile systems to strike a weapons depot in Russia’s Bryansk region following U.S. President Joe Biden’s reported authorization of their use.
The White House has not officially confirmed the decision.
Zelenskiy did not confirm or deny the use of ATACMS in the attack on Bryansk, saying during a news conference that “Ukraine has long-range capabilities…. We now have a long ‘Neptune’ (Ukrainian-made cruise missiles) and not just one. And now we have ATACMS. And we will use all of this
On November 20, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said a Russian military command post had been “successfully struck” in the town of Gubkin in Russia’s Belgorod region, some 168 kilometers from the Ukrainian border. It did not say what kind of missiles had been used in the attack.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg News reported the Ukrainian military had also fired a British-supplied Storm Shadow into Russia for the first time, citing an unnamed Western official.
Separately, the Ukrainian Air Force said Russian troops attacked Ukraine early on November 20 with 122 drones, 56 of which were shot down over 14 regions — Kyiv, Cherkasy, Chernihiv, Poltava, Kirovohrad, Zhytomyr, Khmelnytskiy, Sumy, Mykolayiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhya, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, and Kharkiv.
Meanwhile, the mayor of Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odesa, Hennadiy Trukhanov, said the death toll after a Russian strike on the city on November 18 had risen to 11.
