Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, head of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Troops, noted that only members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are known to regularly use armor-piercing tank rounds containing depleted uranium, most notably during the Iraq War, when the United States used at least 300 tons of depleted uranium.
“As a result, the radiation situation in the city of Fallujah was much worse than in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the nuclear bombings by the United States,” said Kirillov. He even noted that Fallujah is nicknamed “the second Chernobyl” due to the skyrocketing number of cancer cases in the city caused by radioactivity.
Furthermore, Kirillov warned that the use of depleted uranium munitions would also cause irreparable harm to Ukraine’s farmlands.
“In addition to infecting its own population, this will cause tremendous economic damage to the agro-industrial complex of Ukraine … reducing any export of agricultural produce from Ukrainian territory for many decades, if not centuries to come,” he warned.