YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN! UK Tells Ukraine it Won't Help Clean Up Radioactive Bullets

Heappey said there is 'no obligation on the UK to help clear up depleted uranium rounds fired from Challenger 2 tanks by the Armed Forces of Ukraine'

SUBSCRIBE TO THE TRENDS JOURNAL MAGAZINE

James Stephen Heappey, the UK’s minister of state for the Armed Forces, confirmed Tuesday that Britain sent thousands of rounds of Challenger 2 ammunition to Ukraine, including “depleted uranium armor-piercing rounds.”

A British Army Challenger 2 Main Battle Tank seen in Estonia (UK MoD)

Heappey admitted the DU munitions “are now under the control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The Ministry of Defense does not monitor the locations from where DU rounds are fired by the AFU in Ukraine.”

Heappey said there is “no obligation on the UK to help clear up depleted uranium rounds fired from Challenger 2 tanks by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. However, we remain committed to helping Ukraine emerge from this war secure, prosperous and free and we are supporting a range of activities to meet Ukraine's immediate needs, restore essential infrastructure and services, and lay the groundwork for its longer-term recovery and post-war reconstruction."

Last month, when the UK announced plans to send the munitions, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the decision “escalatory” because these bullets contain “nuclear components.” The munitions are made with byproducts of the uranium-enrichment process for nuclear bombs.

Britain insisted that depleted uranium “is a standard component and has nothing to do with nuclear weapons.”

“The British Army has used depleted uranium in its armor-piercing shells for decades,” the Ministry of Defense said at the time, according to the BBC. “Russia knows this, but is deliberately trying to disinform. Independent research by scientists from groups such as the Royal Society has assessed that any impact to personal health and the environment from the use of depleted uranium munitions is likely to be low.”

Joshua Frank, a co-editor of CounterPunch, wrote in TomDispatch that it is clear that the use of DU in Ukraine will “will certainly help create an even more lethal, all too literally radioactive theater of war—and Ukraine will end up paying a price for it.”

He wrote: The US Department of Defense estimated that American forces fired more than 860,000 rounds of DU shells “during that 1991 war to push Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s military out of Kuwait. The result: a poisoned battlefield laced with radioactive debris, as well as toxic nerve agents and other chemical agents.”

TRENDPOST: Again, there is a double standard and the same rules do not apply for the U.S. and U.K. Imagine for a moment that Russia announced that it will begin firing munitions with depleted uranium? 

The U.S. is an expert on how to use depleted uranium in conflicts and employed the technology in the 1991 Gulf War, Kosovo in 1999, and in Iraq in 2003. It should be noted that the U.S. was crowned by the Asia Times as the World’s Heavyweight Champion in using DU ammunition. 

Rounds Fired

Iraq (1991): 782,414

Iraq (2003): More than 300,000 

Kosovo: 50,000

The International Atomic Energy Agency has noted that use of these DU rounds could pose a radiation risk to individuals who handle fragments and who live nearby where these shells impacted, the BBC noted. Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said the British “have lost their bearings” and said the munitions are “a step toward accelerating escalation.”

Britain defended its decision by stating that NATO countries have used these shells for decades and they had nothing to do with nuclear weapons.