With two months left to go in his presidency, President Biden has made another policy change to help Ukraine as Russian troops advance. Defense secretary Lloyd Austin said Wednesday that the administration has agreed to supply Ukraine with anti-personnel land mines, the New York Times reports. Austin said the policy change is a response to Russia's changing tactics. He said Russian ground troops, not armored personnel carriers, are leading the advance and there is "a need for things that can help slow down that effort on the part of the Russians," the AP reports. Austin said the mines would not be used in heavily populated areas.
- The mines: Austin said the mines would be "nonpersistent" mines. Such mines, unlike the ones that kill or injure people years after conflicts end, lose their battery charge or self-destruct within days or weeks, the Washington Post reports. "The land mines that we would look to provide them would be land mines that are not persistent, you know, we can control when they would self-activate, self-detonate and that makes it far more safer eventually than the things that they are creating on their own," Austin said.