Cluster munitions have killed or injured more than 1,200 civilians in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion began, a monitor said on Monday, decrying “troubling setbacks” in global efforts to eradicate the weapons.
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Since Russia expanded the invasion of its western neighbour in February 2022, Ukraine has registered the highest number of recorded annual cluster munition casualties worldwide, the Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC) said in its annual report.
Russia has used the widely banned weapons “extensively” since the first day of the war, it said, adding that Ukraine too had used the weapons and faces Russian accusations of deploying them inside of Russia.
At least 193 cluster munition casualties were recorded in Ukraine in 2024, out of 314 globally, the report said.
In total, more than 1,200 such casualties have been registered in Ukraine since the start of the war, most of them in 2022.
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But the report stressed that the figure was surely a dramatic underestimate, pointing out that last year alone, Ukraine suffered around 40 cluster munition attacks where casualty numbers were not given.