Cluster munitions killed or wounded 1,063 people in 2025, most of them in Ukraine

Cluster munitions killed or wounded at least 1,063 people in 2025, the Cluster Munition Coalition said on 8 September. Ukraine accounted for 927 of those casualties, 87 percent of the global total and the highest national figure for a fourth straight year. Civilians were 87 percent of all recorded victims. Children were about 42 percent. The 2022 count of 1,172 remains the peak. Last year's figure is the third-highest since the Monitor began in 2010.

Fresh attacks caused 946 casualties. Remnants caused 117. New casualties were logged in nine countries: Afghanistan, Cambodia, Iraq, Laos, Lebanon, Myanmar, Russia, Syria and Ukraine. The report said Iran, Myanmar, Russia, Thailand and Ukraine used cluster munitions in the period. None of those states is a party to the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions. Unconfirmed use was also reported in Mali.

Cluster munitions open in the air and throw bomblets across a wide area. Many bomblets fail to explode and sit in fields and schoolyards for years. That is why a weapon used in 2025 still wounds people in Laos and Cambodia, and why a treaty written in 2008 still has a review conference. The Third Review Conference opens in Vientiane on 14 September. One hundred and twenty-four countries are members. Lithuania became the first state to leave, a withdrawal that became final in March 2025.

Tamar Gabelnick, the coalition's director, said the treaty had helped affected communities and that the new toll, new use and new production were a warning. The Monitor found evidence of new production in nine countries, including China, Israel, North Korea, Russia and South Korea. Human Rights Watch, releasing the same report, said the United States and Turkey have disclosed plans to transfer cluster munitions to Ukraine. Russia and Ukraine have both used them in the present war. North Korea has transferred stocks to Russia, the report said.

The Convention bans use, transfer, production and stockpiling for its parties. It cannot bind the armies now firing the weapons. The political work in Vientiane is therefore narrower than the casualty table. Members are being asked to condemn production and transfer by non-parties, to keep funding clearance, and to treat Lithuania's exit as a warning rather than a model. Funding cuts already threaten clearance crews in old battlefields. New factories threaten to refill the inventories the treaty was meant to empty.

A reader who has followed Ukraine does not need to be told that cluster munitions are in use there. The Monitor's addition is the global arithmetic for 2025: 1,063 people, 927 of them Ukrainian, 87 percent civilian, 42 percent children, nine countries with new names on the list, five confirmed users outside the treaty, nine producers, and a review conference in the country that still lives with American bomblets from a war that ended fifty years ago. That last fact is why the meeting is in Laos and not in Geneva.