Earlier this week, Russian officials warned again that chemical weapons provocations are being planned in Ukraine. Russia’s deputy permanent representative to the UN, Dmitry Polyansky, said on Monday that instructors of the notorious Syria-based White Helmets group have already been deployed to Ukraine for that purpose. “There is a well-known model in which such provocations [involving chemical weapons] are used in other parts of the world. First, a so-called chemical incident is organized. Then pro-Western non-governmental organizations, especially the infamous White Helmets, stationed nearby, quickly arrive on the scene and collect, in violation of all the norms of the non-proliferation regime, questionable ‘evidence’, and then feed this story to the Western media. We all know this technology,” Polyansky said, reported RT.
Polyansky stressed that Moscow harbors no plans to use any kind of WMDs in Ukraine. While Russia does not even possess any chemical or biological weapons, using them would not make any military sense. “What is the point of using them in Ukraine in an immediate vicinity of our border? We will get nothing that could not be achieved through conventional means,” he said.
Ahmad Salah, a freelance Syrian journalist, writing in modern diplomacy.eu, points to recent statements by a Bellingcat investigator by the name of Christo Grozev who “has spoken about the intention of the Russian Armed Forces to achieve a symbolic victory in Ukraine ahead of 9th May (Victory day in Russia) to cater to the wishes of the Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
“Coming from Grozev, a person who directly participated in the investigation of the controversy around the 2018 chemical attack in Ghouta, Syria, this is an explicit sign of escalation of the Ukrainian conflict,” Salah writes. He notes that in Ghouta “Bellingcat and White Helmets provided fake evidence of the usage of chemical weapons against members of the opposition and civilians by the Syria’s government headed by Bashar Asad” in order to find Assad “guilty” of using chemical weapons against civilians. “Such a power move is not likely to be excluded from the toolbox of the side that is interested in escalating the Ukrainian crisis,” says Salah.
Salah argues that militarily, the Ukrainian forces are in a situation analogous to that of the jihadis in Ghouta in 2018 and so “only international outrage could save the Ukrainian authorities.” Therefore, “If Russia is found guilty of using illegal weapons, it would oblige NATO to intervene.”
