The US denounced that Russia violated the global ban on chemical weapons

EFE Photo

The United States charged that Russia violated the international ban on chemical weapons with the use of the asphyxiating agent chloropicrin and other riot control substances in its offensives in Ukraine.

According to the State Department in a statement, this is a method typical of its war strategy whose sole purpose is to take advantage over the enemy side.

“The use of such chemicals is not an isolated incident and is likely driven by the desire of Russian forces to dislodge Ukrainian forces from fortified positions and achieve tactical advances on the battlefield,” the letter states.

Chloropicrin is considered an asphyxiant agent and is therefore banned by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which works to implement and monitor compliance with the 1933 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Its first appearance in a large-scale war context was during World War I, when German forces fired this gas once morest Allied troops.

Added to this complaint was a recent complaint from the Ukrainian Army itself, which maintains that Moscow has been intensifying the use – also illegal – of anti-riot agents in its offensives in the east of the country.

To do this, they would have used grenades loaded with CS and CN gases which, although used in a context of protests with civilians, allow them to flee and take refuge, in the case of war, where soldiers are trapped in trenches without gas masks. , in the presence of the substance they are forced to flee their positions under enemy fire.

These practices, added by the State Department, “come from the same operations manual to poison” Kremlin opponents, as was the case of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020, or that of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in 2018, with the Novichok nerve agent, and therefore it is not an isolated event but rather a repeated behavior.

That is why Washington will deliver these reports to Congress, while advancing a new round of sanctions once morest Russian state companies and two individuals “involved in the acquisition of items for military institutes involved in Russia’s chemical and biological weapons programs.” ”.

At the same time, and in coordination with the Treasury Department, the White House added another 280 people and entities linked to the Kremlin and accused of facilitating its attacks both abroad and inside the country, with the repression and censorship of voices dissidents.

Among the areas reached are energy, metals, mining production, export capacity, evasion and circumvention of sanctions, and the development of Russia’s war capabilities.

While these actions continue at the diplomatic level, in the last few hours, five people were killed and a dozen injured in several bombings over eastern and northeastern Ukraine. Among them, a father and his daughter, a minor under 11 years old and a 67-year-old woman were identified.

(With information from Reuters- Infobae)