U.S. to provide anti-personnel mines to Ukraine, official says

The Biden administration will provide Ukraine with controversial anti-personnel mines in its war against Russia, a U.S. official confirmed to CBS News Tuesday night.

Anti-personnel mines, or APLs, are designed to be used against people, not vehicles. They can be rapidly deployed and are meant to blunt the advances of ground forces, making them useful for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s advances in Eastern Ukraine, the official said.

The U.S. sought commitments from the Ukrainians on their use to further limit the risk to civilians, the official said, noting that Ukrainians are committed to not employing the mines in areas populated with their own civilians.  

The U.S.-provided APLs are different than the thousands of landmines being employed by Russia in eastern Ukraine in that they are “non-persistent,” meaning they become inert over a preset period of time, usually between four hours and two weeks, the official said. They are electrically fused and require battery power to detonate. Once the battery runs out, they will not detonate.

Tuesday marked 1,000 days since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. CBS News learned Sunday that President Biden had lifted restrictions on Ukraine’s use of U.S. weapons to conduct strikes deep inside Russia.

U.S.-supplied ATACMS were used Tuesday on targets inside Russia, U.S. officials confirmed to CBS News.

Ukraine has been one of the most mined countries in the world since Russia’s invasion in 2022, and Ukraine is inundated with APLs. They are known by deceptively innocent names such as “butterfly” or “petal” mines because they scatter like flower petals when they drop from the sky.

“Typically, several hundred of these at a time will just be liberally and indiscriminately spread across the territory,” Pete Smith, the Ukraine program manager for the HALO Trust, a nonprofit organization focused on ridding warzones of landmines, told “60 Minutes” in August. “They can rest on the roofs. They can sit in guttering. They can take years before they come back into society and into view.”

To date, 164 nations, including Ukraine, have signed onto the Mine Ban Treaty which prohibits the use of APLs. However, three dozen countries have not agreed to it, including Russia and the U.S.

In January 2020, then-President Donald Trump reversed an Obama-era policy which banned the use of APLs anywhere except on the Korean Peninsula. However, in June 2022, Mr. Biden reinstated the ban, except for APLs “required for the defense of the Republic of Korea.” 

contributed to this report.