How false claims are driving Europe toward a dangerous illusion of security.
By Magnus Løvold, Staff member at Lex International
This article was first published on the Spoiler Alert substack on 15 April 2026 and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author.
Last week, Lex International released “Withdrawal Symptoms — Anti-personnel mines and cluster munitions: Setting the record straight,” a new report examining the claims behind calls to reintroduce these weapons in Europe. At a time of growing insecurity, such calls are often framed as necessary for defence. The report challenges that assumption: the military utility of these weapons remains unproven, while their humanitarian costs are well documented and long-lasting. The main point: defence policy must be grounded in evidence — not assumption. Otherwise, we risk embracing a dangerous illusion of security, while shifting the long-term costs onto civilians.
“The inescapable reality,” a group of legal scholars and defence policy practitioners wrote in March last year, “is that anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions are extremely effective weapons.”
Since the defence ministers of Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania announced that same month that they would withdraw from the 1998 treaty banning anti-personnel mines, a post-truth wave has swept over parts of the European defence establishment.
At the core of these efforts — a single, sweeping claim: anti-personnel mines and cluster munitions have had “an enormous battlefield effect” in Ukraine, as the authors of the Policy Exchange note put it.
Variations of that claim have over the past twelve months echoed across Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Even in Norway — the erstwhile champion of humanitarian disarmament — Peter Frølich, chair of the Parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, recently cast these weapons as “the most potent” means of protecting freedom.
Finnish politicians almost immediately fell for the ruse: Against the advice of its own defence forces, they followed their neighbours’ example, and decided to pull out of the Mine Ban Treaty too.
In other countries, parliamentary bills have been introduced. Withdrawal calls have been made. Interviews have been given, and conference statements delivered. All couched in the language of performative realism and anchored in the same oft-repeated claim: anti-personnel mines and cluster munitions have been effective for the Ukrainian war effort against Russia.
The problem with these counter-norm efforts is not only that they completely ignore the significant body of evidence showing the humanitarian harm and extremely limited — sometimes even negative — military utility of these weapons.
More troublingly, the few sources invoked to support these claims turn out — without exception — to be no evidence at all.
Take the Policy Exchange note cited above. Anti-personnel mines have been “crucial offensive and defensive tools” in the Ukraine war, the authors claim. The source? One paper: “Modern positional warfare and how to win it” by Valerii Zaluzhnyi, former Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Zaluzhnyi’s paper is interesting. It illustrates how integrated obstacle systems, including minefields, have held back offensives in the Ukraine war — and concludes, quite plausibly, that to get out of the positional form of warfare along the frontline of that war, it would be necessary, among other things, to “break mine barriers in depth”.
But here’s the catch: The Ukrainian General does not distinguish, in his assessment, between anti-vehicle and anti-personnel mines — and his paper cannot be used, therefore, to support any claim about the specific military utility of the latter. In fact, contrary to what the Policy Exchange note would want us to believe, Zaluzhnyi’s paper does not mention anti-personnel mines at all.
It might be that the editors at Policy Exchange are unaware that the Mine Ban Treaty applies only to anti-personnel mines. A more uncomfortable possibility is that the blurring of the two weapons categories is deliberate — and therefore intended to mislead.
Because it gets worse. To bolster their claim that cluster munitions “have been extremely effective” in Ukraine, the Policy Exchange note cites an “open-source estimate” showing that “Ukraine has inflicted upwards of 300,000 casualties with cluster munitions of various types” since July 2023.
A far-reaching finding — if true. But on closer examination, the estimate reflects a stunning case of causal overreach: sweeping battlefield effects are attributed to the introduction of cluster munitions. Neither sourced nor methodologically explained, the estimate fails to account for any other explanatory factors. Far from being grounded in open-source analysis, it rests solely, as it turns out, on what unidentified “U.S. military professionals” have reportedly told the authors — John Nagl and Dan Rice, a self-described “primary advocate for cluster munitions in Ukraine” — in private.
Again: It might be that the Policy Exchange authors are unfamiliar with the risks of inferring causation from correlation — or of relying on unverified information. But more likely, perhaps, facts and evidence are selected and framed exclusively to support a pre-scripted advocacy message, with little regard for the truth — and the consequences.
Without exception, the arguments that have been advanced over the past twelve months for withdrawal from the Mine Ban Treaty and the Convention on Cluster Munitions have the same onion-like structure: peel back the layers of confident “realist” rhetoric, and you find no real evidence to justify the development or use of these weapons.
As the Secretaries-General of the Nordic Red Cross societies note in a recent piece, there is “no convincing evidence” that the military utility of anti-personnel mines has changed since the Mine Ban Convention was adopted in 1998.
If anything, anti-personnel mines are more obsolete than ever: in Ukraine, drones, precision strike systems and persistent surveillance have largely overtaken the static and indiscriminate functions these weapons were once intended to serve, as shown by Erik Tollefsen and Pete Evans.
This matters beyond the specifics of these weapons. In the ongoing international struggle for its security and survival, Europe has one big advantage: a relatively well-informed citizenry and a tradition — at least in most countries — of exposing policy proposals to open, critical and evidence-based debate.
While Europe’s defence budgets surge, one may only hope their citizens will demand the same level of intellectual honesty and factual accountability in military matters as they expect in other areas of public policy — from health and education to taxation and the environment.
After Trump earlier this year threatened to invade Greenland and dealt a final coup de grâce to U.S. security guarantees — and with Putin still being Putin — it is no surprise that European countries are scrambling to strengthen their defences. But a deteriorating security environment does not make militarily useless weapons more useful, any more than a falsehood told often enough becomes the truth.
As Steffen Kongstad, former Norwegian ambassador and one of the masterminds behind the Mine Ban Treaty and the Convention on Cluster Munitions writes in Withdrawal Symptoms: “The choice facing states today is not between security and restraint. It is between evidence-based policy and dangerous illusion.”
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