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| RolStoppable said: "We will support Ukraine for as long as it takes." The same people: "We will not provide Ukraine with the necessary weapons to win the war." (They don't say this directly, but this is what they do.) This has been on repeat for almost 1.5 years now. There are constant worries that Ukraine could fire on Russian territory while at the same time it's apparently okay that Russia deliberately strikes civilian infrastructure and buildings. Because if it were truly believed that what Russia does is not okay, then the West would have been pulling out the stops a long time ago. Instead large parts of the West seemingly play a game where they want to keep a door open for a return to generally accepted trade with Russia within the next couple of years. In parts it's so blatant by now that Russia could blow up a huge dam and it still didn't change anything about the hesitation to supply Ukraine with the things they need and ask for. |
It's also clear that a lot of Western nations have a luxury view on war too, it's easy to take the morale high ground when your country hasn't fought a war for its existence since WW2 and most who remember those days are now dead. It's easy to ban yourself from using cluster munitions when you've spent the past 30 or so years being the invader towards other far weaker countries than you. They didn't need cluster munitions to absolutely fuck up these countries, they simply used "legal" weapons of mass destruction.
Would all these countries who have banned cluster munitions, if they were in the exact same position as Ukraine, facing a huge foe who is entrenched in their lands, constantly killing their civilians and causing mass destruction, say to themselves: "We can't use everything we can to defend ourselves because we signed an agreement one time years ago to not use this". I don't think they would, I think the agreements on certain weapons would soon fly out of the window if they were in the same position as Ukraine.
The one and only reason they wouldn't have to resort to cluster munitions is because they have the luxury of having far better weapons of mass destruction, they'd likely achieve air superiority because that is a focus of Western countries, something which Ukraine cannot achieve, and from there, they would absolutely aerial bomb the living shit out of every Russian position. Ukraine doesn't have that luxury, they're being forced to fight a counter-offensive with little air support, they have to lean heavily on artillery which is running out because the West doesn't rely on artillery for wars.
I trust Ukraine to do what it believes is best for its own country and having said all of the above, I do think the rules they've accepted in regards to cluster munitions are good rules and ones they should abide themselves to and these rules shouldn't hold them back much at all but will be morally decent and future proofing rules.
Things like closely monitoring, tracking their usage and working with NATO will help clean-up post war, things like a strong focus on de-mining these specific areas is a common sense rule, things like not using them in cities is a morally decent rule which shouldn't hurt their ability to kick Russia out because they largely needs these munitions to get past the trenches, once that happens, well, we've seen what happens when Russian's think their positions are in danger, they retreat, encircling a city is just as effective and they have precision weaponry for city targets.
Western Politicians and Human Rights Groups should have waited for Ukraine to establish these rules first before jumping to an instant "NO!" position and should actually take into account that these munitions have an extremely low dud rate compared to the stuff that both Ukraine and Russia are currently employing so if America can replace Ukraine's cluster munitions, that would even be a net positive in the long run because they're moving down from a dud rate of 30%+ to less than 2%.
Last edited by Ryuu96 - on 08 July 2023
