For the first time, the Americans will deliver depleted uranium munitions to Ukraine. Aid made official on Wednesday by Antony Blinken, the United States Secretary of State, traveling to kyiv. The latter announced new American aid totaling $1 billion. This is a change in policy since, in March, a Pentagon spokesperson closed the door to this type of delivery. Depleted uranium munitions should equip American Abrams tanks, which are scheduled for delivery in the fall.
The Russian Embassy in the United States quickly denounced the “inhumanity” of the United States for “refusing to accept the failure of the so-called counter-offensive by the Ukrainian armed forces.”
kyiv has already received such ammunition from Britain in the spring. They have the ability to pierce almost any defensive armor the Russians can use. But this new aid should not change the course of the Ukrainian counter-offensive. “A modern arrow shell can pierce just about any armor, from any angle. I’m not even sure that this is essential in the face of most of the tanks deployed by the Russians, except perhaps a handful of the most modern ones,” explains Léo Peria-Peigné, researcher at the Ifri Center for Security Studies ( French Institute of International Relations).
In 2022, the United Nations Environment Program warned about these munitions, noting that they could “cause localized soil contamination and affect aquatic and terrestrial species.” A minimal risk in reality, according to Léo Peria-Peigné. “Depleted uranium is a by-product of uranium enrichment and has low radioactivity. Furthermore, these munitions will represent less than 0.1% of the munitions fired in Ukraine, which is tiny compared to the amount of lead spilled in Ukraine by the millions of shells fired over the past 18 months. »
The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) had studied the territories in which these munitions have already been used (during the two Gulf wars in 1990 and 2003 and in former Yugoslavia in 1999) and concluded that “the existence of depleted uranium residues dispersed in the environment did not present a radiological risk to the population of the affected regions”.
