US President Joe Biden said on Thursday that NATO would respond if Russia used chemical weapons in Ukraine, and has previously warned that Moscow would “pay a severe price” if it did so.
The use of such weapons against Ukrainian people would mark a dramatic escalation to Russia’s invasion, and would likely demand heavy retaliation from the West.
But concerns have been growing that Russia may be planning to take the step, after the Kremlin planted the unsubstantiated idea that Ukraine and the US may use these weapons. “It’s a tell that they themselves may be preparing to do so, and then trying to pin the blame on someone else,” US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said earlier this month.
Why would their use be so significant? Chemical weapons contain toxic substances designed to cause death or harm to their targets. They can spread dangerous chemicals including choking, blister and nerve agents, which can attack the body and cause death on a vast scale, indiscriminately and across a wide area if they are deployed inside a bomb or an artillery shell.
Their use is banned by international law. Russia has signed those treaties and claims it doesn’t have chemical weapons, but the country has already been linked to the use of nerve agents against critics in recent years. Those cases include the poisonings of Alexander Litvinenko, Sergei Skripal and Alexey Navalny.
A painful history: Widespread horror over the use of chemical agents during World War I resulted in the Geneva Protocol, signed in 1925, which banned chemical weapons attacks.
Nonetheless, as many as 25 countries worked to develop chemical weapons during the Cold War, according to the United Nations’ Office for Disarmament Affairs. Lengthy negotiations eventually led to the adoption of…
Source : cnn
