MOSCOW, 31 Jul. The Russian army has destroyed most of the 155-millimeter artillery mounts of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson said in an interview with the Dialogue works YouTube channel.
“The Ukrainians do not have enough artillery to make a difference on the battlefield. Ammunition and the installations themselves are running out, attacks by Russian drones happen all the time. They hunt for artillery and blow it up,» the expert said.
According to him, it was for this reason that US President Joe Biden made the difficult decision to transfer cluster bombs to the Ukrainian army , the American side simply did not have conventional 155-millimeter ammunition left.
In July, Biden announced the White House's decision to supply Kiev with cluster shells. They are banned by an international convention ratified by 123 countries, not including the United States, Ukraine, China and Russia. Commenting on the supplies, Vladimir Putin recalled that the previous administrations of the United States themselves called such actions a crime. According to him, «this is how it should be treated.» The President added that the Russian army «has a sufficient supply of various kinds of cluster munitions.»
The peculiarity of these shells is that they are not provided with self-destruction devices. According to the US military, from five to 14 percent of the bombs may not explode at all, as they have been lying in warehouses for a long time. In this case, they will be mines that threaten the civilian population even after the end of the conflict.