A report by Responsible Spacecraft stated that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's claim that the anti-personnel landmines supplied by the Biden administration to Ukraine are safe is entirely false.

The Biden administration has authorized providing Ukraine with anti-personnel landmines for domestic use, reversing previous efforts to reinstate President Obama's ban on the use, production, transfer, and storage of indiscriminate weapons beyond the Korean Peninsula.

According to a US official to The Washington Post, the intention behind this reversal is to "contribute to more effective defense." 

The landmines, prohibited in 160 countries under an international treaty, are likely to be deployed mainly in eastern Ukraine, where Ukrainian forces are fighting to hold off the continuous advance of the Russian military, as reported by Responsible Spacecraft. 

The report emphasized that similar to the Biden administration's controversial decision to provide Ukraine with cluster bombs—an indiscriminate weapon whose unexploded ordnance can maim and kill civilians, especially children, for decades after use—this move may offer limited military upside. However, according to the report, this could pose substantial risks to Ukrainian civilians and is unlikely to shift the war's outcome in Ukraine's favor.

Austin revealed this policy shift to reporters during a visit to Laos, a country that the United States helped make the most heavily bombed nation in the world per capita, as per the report. 

The Responsible Spacecraft report pointed out that despite the irony of making this announcement in a country where 30% of its land is still contaminated with unexploded ordnance from the US military, Austin brushed off humanitarian concerns regarding the weapon transfer.

He claimed that landmines are "not persistent" and emphasized that "we can control when they would self-activate, self-detonate and that makes it far more safer eventually."

According to the report, arms control experts from the Committee on National Legislative Affairs have cautioned that the distinction between permanent and non-permanent landmines is "dangerously misleading", pointing to the well-documented failures of the self-destruct and self-disable features designed to make these weapons "safer" for civilians who may encounter them years after the conflict.

It added that the "smart mines" deployed by the United States during the Gulf War failed at a rate 150 times higher than the Department of Defense had reported.