Hello and welcome to NewsHour. It's coming to you live from the BBC Studios in London. I'm Tim Franks.

It is just Wednesday, but this already counts as the week when Ukraine is suddenly getting a whole set of new weapons to fight Russia.

Today, following Sunday's decision by the Biden administration to allow

the Ukrainian use of attackams American long-range missiles to hit targets deep inside Russia,

the BBC's learned that Ukraine has used British-made, storm shadow cruise missiles to hit a position

in the Russian region of Kursk. The other big and certainly attention-grabbing move by Washington today

has been to provide anti-personnel mines to Ukraine

to try to blunt continuing Russian advances.

These types of mines have been banned for almost 30 years

by the vast majority of countries, more than 160.

The US and Russia are not signatories to that convention. The US insists these minds will be non-persistent in the jargon,

in other words, sales ceased to be operational within a couple of weeks and so safer to deploy.

But Mary Wareham, a director at Human rights watch, who successfully campaigned for the UN

anti-landmine convention in 1997, said she was horrified by the US decision.

I mean, this is a shocking and devastating development for the international community working

to eradicate anti-personnel landmines. So much progress has been made over the past 25 years

under the framework provided by the international treaty banning landmines.

So it's just inconceivable that the US would take this step.

We don't know what particular anti-personnel landmines the US intends to transfer because it's not yet made the announcement.

But officials are commenting in an anonymous capacity.

They're alleging that these mines have got special features that would self-destruct,

self-neutralize, deactivate, whatever you want to call it.

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