i don’t think Ukraine should carte blanche do things i would consider bad and harmful just because they’re unambiguously the good guys. cluster munitions have clear drawbacks and are clearly harmful to people who aren’t Russians and aren’t combatants when used, and i don’t think countries should kill civilians and people who haven’t done anything wrong just because it maybe potentially will slightly expedite a war that’s now been going on for almost ten years. that’s a good way to end up concluding war crimes are justified because they’re happening to the “wrong” people.

How about you let Ukrainians the Ukrainian bourgeoisie decide how best to defend their homes property and class interests?

It’s going to be military targets which will be fucked up.

unless you have data i don’t, the article seems to pretty definitively refute this point. overwhelmingly the people impacted by cluster munition use are civilians (97% of casualties were civilians in 2021) both in and outside of Ukraine, and their usage has a very long tail of fatalities.^[1] there is no reason to think that even if they’re tailored specifically to nebulous military use against Russian soldiers that won’t also be the outcome here, because it is literally everywhere else they get used.

And no, seeing how cluster ammunition is practically used, russian civilians are not going to disproportionately harmed. It’s going to be military targets which will be fucked up.

The issue with cluster munitions isn’t how they’re used, but what happens when a bomblet fails. Cluster bombs release hundreds to thousands of submunitions, and when one bomblet fails, it can remain armed and ready to detonate if/when someone comes by and bumps it, picks it up or runs over it with a tractor.

This can lead to issues long after the war is finished, as people are doing their own thing and get hurt or killed.

Yours is the only plausible rebuttal I’ve seen in this thread. I’m aware of how inhumane Russian military has been but I’ve also seen few (a small number) of stories when Ukranian military did something questionable.

Can you expand upon how the cluster munitions might be used and if there’s any oversight regarding their usage? (Which seems fair given how things turned out in Afghanistan).

This is less about who started what, and more about who will keep dying from it for the next 20 years.

Imagine Ukraine retakes control over some territories using cluster bombs… now they end up with an unknown number of unexploded bomblets lying around Ukrainian territory.

It’s also very likely that Ukraine will be using the cluster munitions to clear out minefields more than using them as an attacking/defensive weapon

pretty much everyone says they’re going to use these for good reasons that will not harm civilians and have purely military consequences―it never works out that way, and seldom is restricted to those uses once rubber hits the road. i’m not sure why we’re assuming that this will be any different other than that the actor is sympathetic and we’d like to (incorrectly) assume their judgement is unimpeachable and infallible.

You’re assuming they will be used in the conventional way instead of, say, breaking out the submunitions to drop individually with drones.

yes, because it’s basically a guarantee they will be used in the conventional way even if they’re also used for other purposes―the level of trust being assumed here of Ukraine is, respectfully, kind of silly given the extremely well established issues with any usage of these things and the nature of wars. things which “shouldn’t” be used get used all the time.

and also: even in the best case scenario here, individually using them is basically a lateral move. the problem with cluster munitions is a very high rate of failure which given their size and number adds up massively over time relative to other munitions―individual usage doesn’t really help that, it just slows the problem.