Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” that President Joe Biden’s decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine was needed because the nation would have been “defenseless” without it.
Mitchell said, “You have talked about NATO’s unity. There is disagreement over the cluster munitions, clearly. More than 100 nations have banned them. We knew that this counteroffensive was coming. By many reports, it’s bogged down, it’s difficult, the Russians are dug in. So why didn’t we earlier supply enough conventional munitions so that they would have enough ammunition without resorting to these deadly weapons?”
Blinken said, “Andrea, this comes down to a simple proposition. Every step along the way we worked to make sure Ukraine has what it needs whether it needs it to deal with the Russian aggression and to pursue the counteroffensive to retake territory. But what’s happened is this, and this is why the decision on the cluster munitions, the stockpiles around the world and in Ukraine of the unitary munitions, not the cluster munitions, were running low, about to be depleted. And so, the hard but necessary choice to give them the cluster munitions amounted to this, if we didn’t do it, we don’t do it, then they will run out of ammunition. If they run out of ammunition, then they will be defenseless.”
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