RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin threatened “reciprocal action” today if Ukraine uses cluster bombs against his country’s forces.

The United States recently agreed to supply Ukraine with the weapons, prompting international uproar and concerns even among its Nato allies, since these weapons are widely banned.

The US announcement followed Britain’s decision to send depleted uranium munitions to Ukraine, which Russia cited as a provocation justifying its deployment of nuclear weapons on the territory of its ally Belarus.

Russia has “sufficient stockpiles” of cluster bombs and “reserves the right” to respond in kind to their use, Mr Putin said. 

Neither Russia nor Ukraine has ratified the treaty banning cluster bombs, which fragment in mid air into multiple bomblets that fall over a wide area, posing an extreme risk to civilians. Unexploded bomblets can kill or maim people years after a conflict has ended and are costly to locate and remove.

Both Moscow and Kiev’s forces have been accused of already using cluster bombs in the war, but Mr Putin claimed today that Russia had not done so “until now.”

His remarks came in a television interview broadcast last night, in which he also declared that Ukraine’s counteroffensive was “not succeeding” and that Russian defensive lines in occupied Ukrainian territory were holding.

Both armies continued to shell behind each other’s lines over the weekend, with Russia bombarding the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, killing at least three people, and Ukrainian shelling killing a woman in Shebekino in the Russian border region of Belgorod.

Russia said it had foiled a massive drone attack on the Sevastopol naval base in Crimea, shooting down 10 Ukrainian drones.