The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thousands of lethal darts fired into Ukrainian suburb
At Svitlana Chmut’s house outside Kyiv, there are carrots in her garden and deadly Russian mini-arrows in her yard.
A pile of the sharp, finned projectiles rounded up by Chmut are now gathering rust in the spring’s fine mist. She combed her walled courtyard for them, she said, after a Russian artillery shell carrying them burst somewhere overhead days before the Russians withdrew late last month, seeding the area with thousands of potentially lethal darts. Some were embedded in the tarp that covered her vehicle, as if someone nailed them to her car.
“If you look closely on the ground around my house, you will find a lot more of them,” said Chmut, 54.
These projectiles, called fléchettes, are rarely seen or used in modern conflict, experts have said. Many landed in the street in the strike, Chmut said, including some observed by
Washington Post reporters, among fields of gear and the occasional liquor bottle or chocolate bar abandoned by retreating Russian soldiers.
At 3 centimeters in length, these fléchettes look like tiny arrows. They have a long history in war — a version of them was dropped from airplanes in World War I and used by the U.S. in Vietnam — but are not in common use today. Shells packed with fléchettes are primed to explode over infantry formations and spew projectiles in a conical pattern, with some versions dispersing fléchettes across an area three football fields wide.
Chmut found the projectiles in her car the morning of March 25 or 26, she said, after a night of intense shelling on both sides. It’s not clear if the Russian shell wounded their own troops. The soldiers set up artillery positions and parked tanks in yards near Chmut’s home but would move into civilian houses at night, she said. Fléchettes would not pose a danger to people inside buildings.
Fléchettes are narrowly shaped to achieve aerodynamic stability and with simple, nail-like manufacturing in mind, said Neil Gibson, a munitions expert at the U.k.based Fenix Insights group. The fléchettes recovered from Chmut’s yard likely came from a 122 mm 3Sh1 artillery round, he said, which is among a few Russian munitions that carry the projectiles.
Gibson has reviewed photos of those artillery rounds left behind by Russian troops but has not seen their documented use in Ukraine, he said. Maj. Volodymyr Fito, a spokesperson for Ukrainian land forces command, said the Ukrainian military does not use shells with fléchettes.
Some human rights groups have decried the use of fléchettes because they are indiscriminate weapons that can strike civilians even if they are aimed at military formations. They are not banned by international conventions, but “they should never be used in built-up civilian areas,” Amnesty International has said.