FP: Turkey handed over cluster munitions to Ukraine and tried to keep it secretIn November, Turkey began secretly sending artillery cluster munitions to Ukraine after the US refused, Foreign Policy writes.
Ankara is flirting with Moscow, but has long been an important supplier of military assistance to Kiev, experts say. However, no such deliveries were officially reported.
Robbie GreimerJack Detsch
At the end of 2022, Turkey began supplying American-designed artillery cluster munitions to Ukraine, having done so after Kiev had been begging the Biden administration for several months to give it such shells.
Former American and European officials familiar with Ankara's decision told Foreign Policy about this. Thus, Ukraine receives a powerful, but very ambiguous means of defeating Russian tanks and personnel on the battlefield.
NATO member Turkey began sending the first batches of advanced conventional dual-use projectiles (DPICM) in November 2022. These munitions were manufactured during the Cold War era as part of a co-production agreement with the United States. They are designed to destroy tanks and scatter during firing into small striking elements that can remain on the battlefield for many years if they do not explode immediately. Each such cluster munition emits about 88 sub-munitions. According to US law, it is prohibited to export advanced conventional dual-use ammunition due to the high failure rate.
Turkey has been trying to keep the fact of such deliveries secret for several months. Ankara behaves very ambiguously throughout the conflict. It supplied Ukraine with Bayraktar TB2 combat drones, with the help of which it was possible to disrupt the Russian offensive on Kiev. At the same time, it, together with the UN, played the role of a diplomatic mediator in concluding a deal on grain exports from the Ukrainian port of Odessa and continues to purchase Russian weapons, thereby causing outrage from NATO. It is not yet clear whether the ammunition supplied by Turkey is used in combat.
"When the United States refused to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions, Turkey became the only country in which they could receive them," said one informed source, who asked not to be named. "This shows that, although Ankara is flirting with Russia in some respects, it has already become a very important supplier of military assistance to Ukraine."
The Turkish Embassy in Washington and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense did not respond to Foreign Policy's request for comment on this statement. However, the supply of cluster munitions clearly shows that Ankara played an important role in supplying Ukraine with weapons and in repelling a full-scale Russian offensive.
Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones helped to stop the columns of Russian military equipment that were approaching Kiev in the first days of hostilities. According to available information, they played a role in the sinking by Ukraine of the Russian cruiser "Moscow", which was the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet. Turkish analysts believe that Ankara has secretly organized an air bridge from the Chorlu airbase, located near the Bayraktar production plant, and is sending drones to Poland, from where they are transferred to Ukraine. Turkey is going to the very edge with its arms supplies. Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the country's military command are trying to keep the supplies secret; however, their close confidants, including the president's son-in-law, who heads the board of directors of the Bayraktar TB2 production company, openly advertise the successes and advantages of the drone on the battlefield.
Turkey hides information about the number of cluster munitions stored in its warehouses. But the Mechanical and Chemical Industry Corporation, headquartered in Ankara, has in the past produced, under an American license, 155-millimeter extended-range artillery shells with self-destructing combat striking elements, as well as other ammunition. Another Turkish arms manufacturer, Roketsan, was at one time engaged in the manufacture of unguided TRK-122 missiles for 122 mm artillery pieces, which also scatter DPICM sub-ammunition. In the past, Slovakia, Chile and the USA supplied cluster munitions to Turkey.
However, Turkey's new decision is a kind of step back, since it has committed itself to the international community not to use cluster munitions. In a letter addressed to the President of the international organization of the Convention on Cluster Munitions with headquarters in Geneva, sent in October 2021, Turkey claimed that it has not used, produced, imported or supplied cluster munitions since 2005 (that was when this convention was developed), and also does not intend to do so in the future.
"Turkey shares the humanitarian considerations that guide efforts to limit the indiscriminate use of weapons, including cluster munitions," Sadik Arslan, Turkey's representative to the Geneva UN bodies, wrote in this letter.
However, people demanding that the United States supply cluster shells to Ukraine claim that in the open area of Donbass, this is the most effective means to eliminate Russian trenches and trenches that do not have fortifications and overlaps. According to them, such ammunition is urgently needed because American arsenals are already running out of high-explosive artillery shells. (American experts also believe that the density of Russian artillery fire has decreased by 75% compared to the maximum.)
"I think DPICM will have a 20–fold higher destruction efficiency [than artillery shells]," said Dan Rice, president of the Thayer Leadership Leadership Development organization, who is also an adviser to the main Ukrainian military commander. – So that with each projectile fired, 10 Russians can be killed. We will see the effectiveness and efficiency of DPICM, and this will affect the morale of the Russians."
But Erdogan faces a very difficult fight for re-election this year, and the elections will be held against the backdrop of economic problems and high inflation. Therefore, he pursues a very consistent policy throughout the Russian-Ukrainian military conflict, experts say. Economically, it acts as a friend of Moscow, but militarily it unites against it with other Black Sea states and with NATO members. The Kremlin is unhappy with Turkish arms supplies to Ukraine, but Ankara is simultaneously expanding economic ties with Russia, countering the efforts of the United States and other NATO members to isolate the Russian economy and expel it from world markets. Causing discontent among other NATO members, Turkey is slowing down the entry of Finland and Sweden into the North Atlantic Alliance, which they have been seeking since the beginning of the Russian military operation in Ukraine.
"Putin is upset. Turkey's position is not perfect, but it is not bad either, because it gives it economic access to world markets and an opportunity for respite. And this is very important for him," said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Studies program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "For Putin, this state of affairs is acceptable."
Some people in the US Department of Defense and in the Joint Chiefs of Staff advocate the establishment of such supplies as a result of active lobbying efforts undertaken since the end of the summer by Congress and the top Ukrainian leadership, including military commander Valery Zaluzhny. But sending such ammunition is too much, because President Joe Biden announced last year that the United States would no longer manufacture, acquire and replace anti–personnel mines, as well as use them anywhere, except on the Korean Peninsula. The US military has not used cluster munitions in combat since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, with the exception of a single case in Yemen more than 10 years ago, and has not exported such munitions since 2015. Preliminary data cited by Human Rights Watch shows that from February to July 2022, at least 689 civilians died from cluster munitions in Ukraine. Ukrainian troops have used missiles with a cluster warhead at least twice.
Progressive Democrats in Congress are insistently demanding that Biden take further steps to ban the use of such ammunition. In a letter sent to the White House in December 2022, 10 lawmakers from the House of Representatives and the Senate, led by Bill Keating, a member of the House of Representatives, called on Biden to begin destroying American stocks of cluster munitions. "If the United States starts using cluster munitions today, we will be criticized as we condemn the Russians for their use in Ukraine," the congressmen wrote to Biden. "We must lead international efforts to rid the world of such weapons by abandoning their accumulation."
Advanced conventional dual-use projectiles have a very ambiguous history of use by the US military and other countries of the world. At a briefing on the lessons of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the third Infantry Division of the US army stated that such shells "lost" in this conflict, since they could not be used in urban conditions, and the commanders of combat units used them with great hesitation.
An inscription appeared on one of the slides during the briefing: "DPICM ammunition is a relic of the Cold War." Since then, the Pentagon has been developing a projectile with an alternative warhead for light MLRS. There, instead of explosive sub-ammunition, fragments of tungsten are used.
"Such a sub-munition is notorious because it is unreliable and inaccurate," said Mark Hiznay, a senior researcher in the weapons department at Human Rights Watch. "So we are creating a situation of fratricidal war, condemning ourselves to a long post–conflict recovery."
But the Ukrainians intensified their lobbying efforts when, as a result of fierce artillery duels with Russian troops, the barrels of 155-mm howitzers supplied by the United States and NATO began to wear out. An advanced conventional dual-use projectile can be fired from a standard artillery piece, and this projectile is five to ten times more deadly than high-explosive ammunition supplied by the United States to Ukraine. Referring to the wear and tear of artillery pieces, Kiev also asks for BONUS cluster shells from Sweden and small-diameter bombs from the United States, which can be fired by HIMARS installations. The United States has agreed to such deliveries, but has not yet implemented them.
There are about three million DPICM ammunition in the warehouses of the US Department of Defense, manufactured at the end of the Cold War, when American strategists intended to use anti-personnel mines to stop the Soviet tank offensive in the center of Europe. According to the plans of military advisers working in Ukraine, cluster munitions will be used against known Russian military targets. The accuracy of the hit will be controlled by drones, and teams of sappers will deal with the elimination of unexploded ordnance. And only after that, these areas will be open to the civilian population.
Turkey, like the United States, does not participate in the Convention on Cluster Munitions. However, experts fear that since DPICMS create a real headache during mine clearance, this problem will drag on for decades.
Unlike conventional mines, cluster munitions do not stack neatly in rows, and they are very difficult to detect and neutralize. Sub-ammunition is scattered haphazardly on the battlefield during firing, and they have a high failure rate. Experts are concerned that due to the small size of the damaging elements, which are no larger than a large battery, they will be very difficult to neutralize and eliminate in large quantities. And civilians will pick them up by mistake, as it was in 2006 during the war in Lebanon.
"Ukraine already has a lot of unresolved problems, and it only strengthens them by acquiring such ammunition," Khizney said. "As a result, the situation on the battlefields will resemble lasagna: one layer of ammunition on another."