State Department spokesman Matthew Miller struggled with an update on Monday, calling the war with Russia a “strategic failure for Ukr...
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller struggled with an update on Monday, calling the war with Russia a “strategic failure for Ukraine” — and then repeated the exact same statement after one of the journalists present tried to help him make a correction.
Miller made the misstep during a Monday briefing — just days after President Joe Biden had given the go ahead for the United States to send widely-banned cluster bombs to Ukraine.
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“We believe the war has been a strategic failure for Ukraine,” Miller said, and was abruptly corrected by a member of the press corps.
“Don’t you mean ‘a strategic failure for Russia?'” he asked.
“I’m sorry — excuse me,” Miller said before immediately repeating, “— a strategic failure for Ukraine! Thank you for the correction!”
Miller’s briefing comes just days after the Biden administration green-lighted another $800 million aid package for Ukraine — which has stirred controversy because it is set to include cluster bombs.
Cluster bombs have been banned by a number of nations, in part because they pose a risk to civilians. When cluster bombs explode, they send out showers of smaller “bomblets” that cannot be precisely targeted and could potentially land in areas where they were not intended to go.
The controversial munitions also pose a risk to soldiers on the ground because the bomblets don’t always detonate properly. This means that soldiers — whether on foot or in vehicles — have to be very careful when traveling through areas that have been bombed and should have bomb techs on hand to deal with any unexploded ordnance.
Biden’s plan to send cluster bombs to Ukraine raised enough red flags that members of his own party have warned against it.
“Once you see what takes place, we know what takes place in terms of cluster bombs being very dangerous to civilians,” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) told Jake Tapper on Sunday. “They don’t always immediately explode. Children can step on them. That’s a line we should not cross.”
“There is an international convention against [the] use of these cluster munitions that dates back to 2008,” Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) told “Fox News Sunday” host Shannon Bream that same day. “And the reason the prohibition was put in place, as you have described, is that these are kinds of munitions that can lead to some downstream risks to civilians.”
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