WASHINGTON – Ukraine has broadened a request for controversial cluster bombs from the United States to include a weapon that it wants to cannibalize to drop the anti-armor bomblets it contains on Russian forces from drones, according to two U.S. lawmakers. Kyiv has urged members of Congress to press the White House to approve sending the weapons but it is by no means certain that the Biden administration will sign off on that. Cluster munitions, banned by more than 120 countries, normally release large numbers of smaller bomblets that can kill indiscriminately over a wide area, threatening civilians. Ukraine is seeking the MK-20, an air-delivered cluster bomb, to release its individual explosives from drones, said U.S. Representatives Jason Crow and Adam Smith, who both serve on the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee. That is in addition to 155 mm artillery cluster shells that Ukraine already has requested, they said.

So as the United Nations, European authorities and human-rights groups build war-crimes cases, they have turned to a novel tool: artificial intelligence. With the regime of President Bashar al-Assad emerging largely victorious from nearly a decade of conflict, efforts to bring about some measure of accountability are gaining speed, largely in European courts. Since the beginning of Syria's conflict, activists on the ground risked their lives to document human-rights violations, from torture and attacks on protesters to indiscriminate rocket strikes and barrel bombs. Now, AI and machine learning could play an integral role in bringing war criminals to justice for Syria by helping to sort through the huge trove of evidence, and serve as a model for investigations into other modern-day conflicts. "You have a use of technology both to disseminate the information, capture it, and now to search it that is suddenly very different and changes the way you work," said Catherine Marchi-Uhel, who heads the United Nations body tasked with collecting Syrian evidence and building cases.