An LCI report has updated the use of chemical weapons by Russia in Ukraine.
“For the past few weeks, we have seen an increasingly frequent and massive use of these chemical agents, analyzes Olivier Lepick, specialist in chemical weapons.
The use of this arsenal is however prohibited by international law.
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Ukraine: 4ᵉ year of war
The use of chemical weapons by Russia in Ukraine is “completely assumed “Analysis Olivier Lepick, researcher associated with the Foundation for Strategic Research, specialist in chemical arms. And it does not date from yesterday. “It’s already a few tens of months and the OPC, [Organisation pour l’interdiction des armes chimiques, ndlr]the organization which manages the prohibition of chemical weapons, has already produced several reports which have formally and undoubtedly proven to use prohibited weapons “he explains.
And to add: “For the past few weeks, there has been an increasingly frequent and massive use of these agents, including chloropicrin.”
This suffocating agent replaced CS gas, a powerful tear gas agent prohibited as part of a conflict armed by the Convention on Chemical Weapons (CIAC) in 1993. Convention signed by the Russians. Chloropicrin was used during the first World War, and cause serious irritation of the skin, eyes, respiratory and digestive ways, and can cause death.
Why does Russia go against international law using these weapons? For the same reason in 1914-1918, according to the expert: “It is a front that looks more or less like the trenches during the First World War, with fighters who take refuge in fortified positions”, explains Olivier Lepick.
-Dump this irritating gas into enemy positions allows “To force soldiers to fight in even more difficult conditions“, or even to do them”Get out of these fortifications, if they have not put on their gas mask, so that they can then neutralize them with more conventional means “.
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LCI document – “We started to vomit”: the chemical war of Russian troops in Ukraine
This is not the first time that Russia has been accused of using chemical weapons, proscribed, even before the war in Ukraine. “The Vladimir Putin regime has carried out a number of special operations or assassinations using military chemical agents, the Novichok in London on [la famille] Skripal and then also against Mr. Navalny “details the specialist.
The ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter almost died in 2018, poisoned on British soil by this innervating agent. Just as the political opponent Alexei Navalny, poisoned in 2020 aboard an airplane connecting Omsk, in Siberia, to Moscow.
