LETTER: Ukraine uses toxic chemicals

Your recent Reuters article alleges, citing Ukrainian sources, that Russia used teargas on the front (“Ukraine says Russia stepping up illegal use of teargas to clear trenches”, April 17).

We want to remind your readership that in October 2023 Russia distributed in the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, as well as UN Security Council and UN General Assembly, exhaustive records of continuous provocations by the Ukrainian military, using toxic chemicals, to blame Russian servicemen for such crimes in violation of Article I of the Chemical Weapons Convention. 

In April 2024, the armed forces of Ukraine used chemical weapons, presumably white phosphorus, near the village of Kleshcheyevka in the Donetsk People’s Republic. In late January it used an unknown toxic chemical that caused burns, with subsequent analysis showing the presence of a banned compound, anthraquinone. In late December 2023, US-made gas grenades loaded with a substance called CS, capable of causing skin burns and respiratory paralysis, were dropped by the Ukrainian military near the town of Krasny Liman.

In July 2023 Ukrainian militants fired at Russian positions near Kleshcheyevka with shells containing chlorine, a war gas that creates a choking effect. In mid-June a Ukrainian drone carrying a plastic container with a mixture of chloroacetophenone and chloropicrin, irritant war gases, was used against Russian troops outside the village of Rabotino. Earlier in the year cases were recorded of hydrocyanic acid, among the group of deadly blood and nerve agents, being carried by Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles.

Ukraine is a Chemical Weapons Convention signatory. Yet the Kyiv regime, with the complicity of Western countries, actively uses toxic chemicals controlled under the convention. Western media and politicians ignore these facts.

In their twisted reality the documented use of weapons-grade chemicals against Russians is nothing special, whereas Russia’s alleged use of teargas — the agent European authorities use against their own people to suppress civil protests — is somehow terrible, inhumane, even a matter of concern for the entire “civilised” community.

Ilya Rogachev
Russian ambassador to SA

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