Their deployment is a direct violation of international law, Moscow’s envoy to the OPCW has said
Vladimir Tarabrin, Russia’s Ambassador to the Netherlands, The Hague, Netherlands, February 21, 2024. © Getty Images / Nikos Oikonomou/Anadolu
Ukraine has repeatedly used chemical weapons provided by the US against the Russian military, a senior diplomat claimed on Monday in an interview with the newspaper Izvestia.
Vladimir Tarabrin, Moscow’s Permanent Representative to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and Ambassador to the Netherlands, noted that the use of chemical weapons is a flagrant violation of international law.
“Over the course of the special military operation, we have recorded cases of Ukraine’s Armed Forces deploying chemical weapons manufactured in the US,” Tarabrin said, saying that the deliveries are part of a well-established and illegal scheme of sending non-lethal chemical weapons to Kiev.
He stressed that the use of toxic chemicals by Ukraine has become systematic, as Western backing allows Kiev to violate international law with impunity. According to Tarabrin, the Ukrainian military uses various types of home-made ammunition, grenades, and containers with unknown substances against Russian forces.
The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), an arms control treaty administered by the OPCW, an intergovernmental organization headquartered in The Hague, was adopted in January 1993 and came into force four years later. As of August 2022, 193 states had signed the treaty. Ukraine has ratified the document and accepted all its obligations.
The convention bans all member states from producing, acquiring, and stockpiling chemical weapons, as well as transferring them directly or indirectly. The signatories are also banned from using such weapons.
The diplomat stressed that Moscow is attracting the attention of international organizations, especially the OPCW, to the violations.
“I think the US and its dependents can only be stopped by maximum transparency, the identification of specific facts that show that they directly supply, or facilitate the supply, of these substances to Ukraine in violation of the CWC,” he said.
Russia’s Defense Ministry has repeatedly accused Kiev of preparing provocations with the use of chemical weapons, including acts on the territory of Ukraine. Last April, the ministry claimed that Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) was plotting such a provocation with the use of “hazardous chemicals” in the city of Sumy, in northeastern Ukraine. Kiev has denied the accusation.
