Determined to leave an even bloodier legacy, President Biden has violated his own policy and approved the shipment of antipersonnel mines to Ukraine, two US officials have told the Washington Post. The move -- which threatens to cause civilian injuries and deaths even after the war ends -- comes in the face of months of Russian battlefield success in which its army has posted the fastest pace of territorial gains since 2022.
The land-mine approval is Biden's second intensification of US military support in just the last few days: Acting very much like a man whose life in politics and life on Earth are both rapidly nearing their ends, Biden over the weekend approved Ukraine's use of long-range, US-supplied, ATACMS missiles against targets deep inside Russia. Brushing aside concerns that such an escalation would nudge the world's foremost nuclear powers closer to World War III, Ukraine wasted no time flexing its new freedom, striking a Russian military facility near the city of Karachev in the Bryansk region -- about 71 miles from the Ukraine border.
In 2022, Biden restored an Obama-era policy that bars America's provision of antipersonnel mines anywhere other than the Korean Peninsula. Biden had condemned then-President Trump as being "reckless" in nixing Obama's policy, saying "It will put more civilians at risk of being injured by unexploded mines, and is unnecessary from a military perspective.”
Now, however, Biden has thrown that sentiment out the window. While the 164-nation Ottawa Convention bans both the use and transfer of anti-personnel mines, neither the United States nor Russia is a signatory. However, Ukraine is.
Member-states of the ban on anti-personnel land mines are colored red on this map furnished by the International Campaign to Ban LandminesAs has been the case with various other types of weapons systems, the Biden-Harris administration had for years refused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's pleas for anti-personnel mines -- only for Biden to now cave just two months before he turns the Oval Office over to Trump, who's promised a swift, negotiated end to the war that has raged since Russia's February 2022 invasion in support of separatists in Ukraine's eastern regions.
One of the officials who spoke to the Post acknowledged that Biden's policy change reflected the Ukrainian army's relentless loss of territory:
“Russia is attacking Ukrainian lines in the east with waves of troops, regardless of the casualties that they’re suffering. So the Ukrainians are obviously taking losses, and more towns and cities are at risk of falling. These mines were made specifically to combat exactly this.”
Ukraine is already among the world's most-mined countries: According to Human Rights Watch, mines cover about 30% of its territory, an expanse about as large as Florida. As of last February, 1,000 civilian deaths were attributed to land mines -- however, most of these deadly incidents involved anti-vehicle mines. Both Russia and Ukraine have liberally deployed anti-personnel mines, and Human Rights Watch had condemned Ukraine for using rocket-deployed anti-personnel mines, which litter a territory with small explosive devices which often come in colors that could invite the curiosity of children.
Human Rights Watch says Ukraine used rockets to scatter these colorful PFM-1S "butterfly" mines around Izium in 2022 (via HRW)Anti-personnel mines are reviled because of their inability to distinguish between combatants and innocents. Organizations that oppose their use were quick to condemn Biden's decision. “It’s a shocking and devastating development,” Mary Wareham, deputy director of the crisis, conflict and arms division at Human Rights Watch, told the Post.
Seeking to allay concerns about anti-personnel mines' notorious record for causing civilian casualties, one of the US officials described the mines in question as being "non-persistent" -- that is, they self-destruct or run out of battery power in a way that supposedly renders them harmless. Civilians better cross their fingers and hope they're not around when these mines randomly blow up or are made to explode in some other unintended fashion -- perhaps as an ex-president Biden is simultaneously sunning on a Delaware beach.
