Vilnius, Jul 12 (AP) Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has welcomed the recent US decision to send cluster munitions to his country, saying Russia also uses the controversial and widely banned weapons.

“Russia constantly uses cluster munitions on our territory. It wages war exclusively on our land. It kills our people,” he said Wednesday at the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.

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“This is about justice," Zelenskyy added. "We defend ourselves, without using (these) weapons on the territory of other states.” Zelenskyy said. Any cluster munitions supplied to Ukraine, he said, would be used “purely for military purposes” and “purely” in Russian-occupied parts of southern and eastern Ukraine.

President Joe Biden earlier this week described the decision to provide the projectiles as “very difficult”, citing their record of killing civilians. Over 120 countries across the world -- but not the US, Russia or Ukraine -- have signed on to an international convention prohibiting the production of cluster munitions and discouraging their use.

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Both Moscow and Kyiv have deployed the munitions during the war, and Ukrainian regional officials have regularly accused Russian forces of using them to target civilians.

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NATO and Ukraine are holding their first ever high-level talks in a new format.

The 31-nation alliance is not letting Ukraine join while the war with Russia is going on, but has launched a NATO-Ukraine Council as part of its political commitment to the country.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says it's “a forum where Ukraine and NATO allies will meet as equals, hold crisis consultations and jointly take decisions. Ukraine is now closer to NATO than ever before.”

Hungary has blocked high-level talks with Ukraine in the past due to concerns over the rights of the ethnic Hungarian minority living in Ukraine. But Stoltenberg said he and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy can convene the NATO-Ukraine Council, so it cannot be blocked.

“This is something new, this is something different. It's a strong tool for political integration, and also for decision-making,” Stoltenberg said Wednesday before chairing the meeting.

Russia had a similar arrangement with NATO, but meetings dwindled after it annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in 2014. Once the war started last year, the allies ruled that “NATO cannot consider Russia to be a partner.” (AP)

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)