The West has drawn a “red line” for Putin that must not be crossed. US President Joe Biden said after the Brussels summit with European allies that NATO would provide “an answer” to the possible use of chemical weapons in Ukraine, which could be one of Moscow’s last strategies to try to win a war , which turned out to be much more difficult than imagined. If the Russian President does not succeed in conquering Kyiv or even in bringing down the city of Mariupol, which has been devastated by bombs for weeks, the Russian President could raise the bar of the conflict by using poisonous gases. Not surprisingly, NATO has announced that it will provide Ukraine with equipment to defend itself against a possible attack: gas masks and injections of atropine or other antidotes to nerve agents.
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Concerns grew after the Kremlin began arguing that Ukraine and the US could use these types of weapons against Moscow. According to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Russia is looking for a “pretext” but “the accusations against Kyiv and NATO are absolutely false”. During the press conference in Brussels, Stoltendberg made it clear that the use of chemical or biological weapons “would completely change the character of the conflict.”
How chemical weapons work
Chemical weapons contain toxic substances embedded in a bomb or artillery shell designed to kill or seriously harm victims. Their use is prohibited under international law. Russia claims not to own them, but the country has already been linked to the use of nerve agents against Sergei Skripal and Alexey Navalny. The use of chemicals such as chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas (or mustard gas) was one of the horrors of World War I and was responsible for nearly 100,000 deaths, according to the United Nations. Therefore, in 1925, the Geneva Protocol was signed, which banned attacks with this type of weapon.
However, according to the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, up to 25 countries worked on the development of chemical warfare agents during the Cold War. Long negotiations led to the passing of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which came into force in 1997, obliging states to destroy their stocks and prohibiting the development, production and use of toxic substances.
In the 1980s, Saddam Hussein used a variety of chemical weapons against Iran. A United Nations medical investigation concluded that the Iraqi army used mustard gas along with nerve agents for 48 hours in the Halabja chemical weapons attack in 1988, causing between 3,200 and 5,000 casualties mostly civilians and wounding thousands. Survivors have shown an increase in cancer cases and congenital diseases. There were also more recent uses in Syria during the civil war: the attacks on Ghouta in 2013 and on Khan Sheikhoun in 2017.
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