UKRAINE saw more than 900 cluster munition casualties in 2022, amid broad Russian use of the widely-banned weapons, driving global casualty figures to a record high, a monitoring group said today.

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year, it has “extensively” used stocks of old cluster munitions and newly developed ones, and Ukrainian forces also used such weapons “to a lesser extent”, the Cluster Munition Coalition said in an annual report. 

In all, the country, which had registered no cluster munition casualties for several years, recorded 916 deaths and injuries from the weapons last year, impacting essentially civilians, the report showed.

Those casualties accounted for the vast majority of the global figure, which rose to 1,172 in 2022 – the highest annual number since CMC began reporting in 2010. 

Nearly all of the casualties registered in Ukraine – 890 of them, including 294 deaths – were caused by attacks using cluster munitions, which can be dropped from planes or fired from artillery, before exploding in mid-air and scattering bomblets over a wide area. 

Such weapons also pose a lasting threat, as many fail to explode on impact, continuing to litter the ground and effectively act as landmines that can go off years after they are deployed. 

Twenty-six of the casualties recorded in Ukraine last year were caused by such cluster munition remnants. – AFP, September 5, 2023.