(London) British Prime Minister Boris Johnson expressed concern on Thursday over reports that the “barbaric” Moscow regime is using chemical weapons in Ukraine.
Posted at 1:54 p.m.
“The things you hear about chemical weapons are straight out of their strategy,” the prime minister said in an interview on Sky News on Thursday, echoing concerns expressed by the United States.
“They (the Russians) start by saying that there are chemical weapons that have been stockpiled by their opponents or by the Americans. And so when they themselves deploy chemical weapons, as I fear they do, they have a kind of maskirovka” – a Russian term for the art of deceiving the enemy – “a ready-made false story”, said said Boris Johnson.
“We saw it in Syria, we saw it… even in the United Kingdom,” he continued, referring to poisonings perpetrated on British soil.
“It’s a cynical, barbaric government,” he continued.
Despite Russian denials, the United Kingdom holds Moscow responsible for the poisoning in 2018 in Salisbury (south of England) of ex-Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Novichok. A Briton died a few weeks later.
Accused by Russia, Washington and Kyiv have denied the existence of laboratories intended to produce biological weapons in Ukraine, which has been facing a Russian offensive led by tens of thousands of soldiers since February 24.
“This is not the first time that Russia has made up such false accusations against another country,” US foreign affairs spokesman Ned Price said on Wednesday, assuring that they had been “definitively and definitively overturned. many times “.
Russia had already accused the United States in 2018 of secretly carrying out biological experiments in a laboratory in Georgia, another former Soviet republic which, like Ukraine, aims to join NATO and the EU.
To justify its offensive, Moscow also considered that Ukraine had the ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, an idea that it nevertheless voluntarily abandoned in the 1990s.