Islamabad: Russia continues to use banned weapons against civilians In the town of Irpin, the Russian army used submunitions to Russian ZSh2 howitzer shells, proscribed by the Geneva Convention. This is confirmed by the discovery, made by the Ukrainian military, of the corresponding fragments from a shell after the town was de-occupied.
“ZSh2” is a 152-mm howitzer projectile with arrow-shaped striking elements. The zone of manpower destruction is 500 meters.
This elementl is prohibited by international conventions due to its enhanced combat characteristics. The shells explode midair and cover a large area with striking elements. One such projectile, fired from a howitzer, carries up to 9,000 deadly arrows (the so-called “nails”).
In 2014-2015, it was ZSh2 that was used against the Ukrainian military in the occupied regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Despite international conventions prohibiting the use of weapons with indiscriminate lethal elements, Russia, led by Putin, has also used lethal weapons against the civilian population in Aleppo, northern Syria.
Even earlier, the lethality of these howitzer shells was tested on Muslim civilians of Chechnya and Afghanistan. Soviet troops from the so-called “international contingent of the Soviet Armed Forces” upon their return from Afghanistan described with horror the bloody fallout of these projectiles’ use against the civilian population.