Westerners are openly worried about a possible use of chemical weapons in Ukraine by the Kremlin, which the failures of its military offensive make even more unpredictable, which raises the specter of atrocities committed by the Damascus regime in Syria.
Russia “will pay a high price if it uses chemical weapons” in its war against Ukraine, United States President Joe Biden said Friday during a speech at the White House.
Since Wednesday, Americans and British have been saying that Russia could use it in Ukraine.
A sign, according to them, that Russia is considering this scenario, Moscow accuses Washington and Kiev of managing laboratories intended to produce biological and chemical weapons in Ukraine, which are prohibited internationally.
The UN Security Council met urgently on Friday on this subject at the request of Moscow, despite the firm denial of Kiev and Washington. “The Kremlin is intentionally spreading outright lies that the United States and Ukraine are carrying out chemical and biological weapons-related activities in Ukraine,” US Foreign Affairs spokesman Ned Price said on Wednesday.
Moscow had already accused in 2018 the United States of secretly carrying out biological experiments in a laboratory in Georgia, another former Soviet republic which, like Ukraine, aims to join NATO and the European Union. .
There are indeed sites in the country that could lend themselves to false flag attacks: Ukraine has “biological research facilities”, confirmed the number three in American diplomacy, Victoria Nuland, stressing that the United States United were “now quite worried about the possibility of Russian forces trying to take control of it.” The Russians “start by saying that there are chemical weapons 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 [terme russe qui désigne l’art de tromper l’ennemi]a false story ready, ”said British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday.
Russia is one of 198 signatories to the Chemical Weapons Convention, which entered into force in 1997, and has officially completed the destruction of 100% of its 40,000 tons of chemical weapons.
Terrorize the population
In recent years, the West has attributed to Moscow two cases of poisoning with the help of a nerve agent, Novichok, which targeted the now imprisoned opponent Alexei Navalny (2020), and the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, in England (2018).
Russia has also been complacent with the regime in Damascus by always denying the repeated use of chemical weapons by Syria against civilians.
These crimes have largely gone unpunished. In 2013, US President Barack Obama, who had nevertheless made it a “red line”, had given up punitive strikes in Syria.
The hypothesis of a use of chemical weapons in Ukraine also worries France, since the Russian army does not achieve the expected success.
The Russian invasion launched on February 24 “was supposed to show Russia’s strength, but the opposite is happening. This makes [le président russe] Vladimir Poutine all the more unpredictable”, supports the French Chief of Staff, Thierry Burkhard, in a letter sent Wednesday to his general officers. “Vladimir Putin did not enter this war to lose it. In the event of being bogged down or humiliated, the use of dirty weapons or tactical nuclear weapons is one of the possibilities, ”adds a senior officer, on condition of anonymity.
“Russia failed to enter the war. We have to save face for the Kremlin,” argues Mathieu Boulègue, Russia specialist at the British think tank Chatham House. “The chemical is a vector that he could very well use. It’s not unlikely. »
In Ukraine, chemical weapons “would be intended to terrorize the population and force them to flee. But it is not a weapon that would change the face of war. A tactical nuclear weapon that would raze a Ukrainian city, yes,” continues Mathieu Boulègue.
Olivier Lepick, associate researcher at the Foundation for Strategic Research and specialist in chemical weapons, is more circumspect.
“We would take an additional step in terror and therefore the disapproval of international public opinion, which would also risk strengthening the sanctions regime, which is already extremely severe. »