The Defense Department will provide Ukraine with antipersonnel land mines, underscoring how President Joe Biden’s administration is becoming increasingly willing to poke the Russian bear in its waning days.
The move comes as the Russians have changed their tactics in Ukraine by leading attacks with dismounted infantry to clear the way for mechanized forces, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters on Wednesday in Laos.
“So that’s what the Ukrainians are seeing right now,” Austin said at a news conference. “And they have a need for things that can help slow down that effort on the part of the Russians. They’re fabricating their own anti-personnel landmines right now.”
Antipersonnel mines typically contain about 1 pound of explosives, compared with anti-tank mines, which usually have more than 11 pounds of explosives. The type of land mines that the U.S. military plans to give the Ukrainians are “not persistent,” meaning they can be set when to activate and explode, Austin said.
These non-persistent mines are much safer than the types of land mines the Ukrainians are building on their own, said Austin, who also noted that the United States has already provided Ukraine with anti-tank mines.
“Because of the way that the fight has evolved, this is just another stage here,” Austin said. “But again, our focus is to help them to meet their needs and they’ve asked for these. And so I think it’s a good idea to provide them.”
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Marine veteran Issac Olvera, who has served as a soldier with the Ukrainian military, said he believes the Biden administration’s decision to give Ukraine antipersonnel land mines is a welcome move, but it also comes “extremely late.”
“Previously, the Ukrainian military has had M-18 Claymore mines (and their analogs),” said Olvera, who lives in Ukraine permanently. “These require soldiers to monitor them full-time and detonate them manually. This severely limits when and how many can be used at one time. Non-persistent mines are necessary to deny Russian advances and to channel them into designated target zones.”
The group Human Rights Watch has condemned the Biden administration for agreeing to provide the Ukrainians with antipersonnel land mines, arguing that the move, “Risks civilian lives and sets back international efforts to eradicate these indiscriminate weapons.”
But Olvera said that critics don’t understand that unlike the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where there were no front lines, the war in Ukraine is much closer to World War II, in that both sides are separated by a no-man’s land between them.
“These areas are devoid of human traffic—only combatants would be in that area,” Olvera said. “Those who argue against the decision are not protecting civilians; they are inadvertently protecting Russian troops.”
Changing US policy
Since the late 1990s, there has been a global movement to ban the use of land mines, in part because they can continue to kill and injure people long after a conflict ends. The 1997 Ottawa Convention bans the production and use of antipersonnel land mines, but neither the United States nor Russia are parties to the treaty.
The U.S. government’s policy on anti-personnel land mines has whip-sawed back and forth over the past two decades. In February 2020, President Donald Trump ended a 2014 policy that prevented the U.S. military from deploying land mines outside of the Korean peninsula.
“This policy will authorize combatant commanders, in exceptional circumstances, to employ advanced, non-persistent land mines specifically designed to reduce unintended harm to civilians and partner forces,” a White House statement at the time said.
Biden reversed Trump’s decision in June 2022, when the White House announced that the U.S. military would only use antipersonnel mines on the Korean peninsula.
But the Biden administration also pledged not to export or transfer antipersonnel mines except when needed to detect, remove, and destroy other mines.
A U.S. official told Task & Purpose that the Ukrainians are committed to not using the antipersonnel land mines they receive from the United States in populated areas of Ukraine.
The land mines that the United States will soon give the Ukrainians are battery powered and won’t detonate after the battery runs out, the U.S. official said.
Easing restrictions
The Biden administration’s decision to give antipersonnel land mines to Ukraine is the latest example of it easing restrictions on the types of weapons it is providing to Ukrainians and how they can be used. Ukraine has
This week, Ukraine used its U.S.-supplied Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, and British Storm Shadow cruise missiles to strike targets in Russia for the first time.
It appears that the Biden administration has only allowed Ukraine to use ATACMS in Russia under extremely limited circumstances, said retired Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, who served as head of U.S. European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO Allied Command Operations from 2013 to 2016.
Breedlove said he believes the Ukrainians are only authorized to use ATACMS in the direct vicinity of Russia’s attack against the Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk region.
“The only one shot has been shot against a target that would directly affect Kursk, and it’s very close to the edges of the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk,” Breedlove told Task & Purpose.
As for the Biden administration’s decision to give the Ukrainians antipersonnel land mines, Breedlove argued that recent criticism of the move would be disingenuous because Russia has indiscriminately sowed mines in Ukraine for the past 10 years.
“Ukraine is now the most heavily mined nation on the face of the planet because of Russia,” Breedlove said. “And all of the sudden, everybody is worried the United States may for a couple of months give Ukraine mines.”
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