Cluster munitions have been used in deadly Russian attacks on Kharkiv, an eastern Ukrainian city with the third-largest population in the country, Human Rights Watch told the Washington Post on Monday.
At least eleven civilians have died and dozens of others were wounded as the Russians targeted the city on Monday morning, per Ukrainian officials. The shelling was reportedly aimed at residential areas and included the use of cluster munitions, which release submunitions or bomblets considered especially dangerous to civilians since they are difficulty to confine to a specific target.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine is a signatory to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, a global “ban on the use, production, stockpiling, and transfer of cluster munitions.”
Mark Hiznay, associate director of the arms division at Human Rights Watch, told the Washington Post "this attack clearly illustrates the inherently indiscriminate nature of cluster munitions and should be unequivocally condemned."
Russian shelling has become seemingly more indiscriminate as the conflict has dragged on and their forces have been held off on the outskirts of Ukraine’s major cities. The Russians briefly took control of Kharkiv on Sunday before being driven back out. Some analysts had expected the urban center to be less resistant to the Russian invasion, given its proximity to the Russian border.
Russian munitions have reportedly been fired at residential areas of the city, and have even hit a school near the center of the city.
Ukrainian interior minister Anton Gerashchenko released a statement acknowledging that "Kharkiv has just been massively fired upon,” and claiming that the Russian attack was responsible for "dozens of dead and hundreds of wounded."
High-ranking Ukrainian and Russian officials held ceas-fire talks on the Ukraine-Belarus border Monday morning but the talks ended without a clear resolution.
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