Russia has asked Washington and Ankara to explain reports of possible plans to transfer to Kyiv a “substantial arsenal” of U.S. weapons and ammunition held by Turkey, the spokeswoman for Russia‘s foreign ministry said on Saturday.
Such a transfer would cause “serious harm … to our bilateral relations with Washington and Ankara,” spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement.
Turkey requested permission from Washington last week to send Ukraine tens of thousands of artillery projectiles and cluster munitions rockets that had sat in Ankara’s stockpiles for decades. They were produced under a 1987 license from the United States.
Neither the U.S. nor Turkey is a signatory to the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, which prohibits the use, sale and export of classes of weaponry that scatter explosive submunitions across a wide area. Human Rights Watch warned that around 40% of these so-called bomblets fail to explode after dispersal, meaning they become “de facto anti-personnel landmines” that can injure civilians long after an end to the conflict.
Washington re-enacted a moratorium on exporting cluster munitions every year between 2009 and 2023, when President Joe Biden bypassed the rule to transfer the weapons to Ukraine.
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