Russian forces are using a banned “chemical weapon [called] chloropicrin against Ukrainian forces,” according to U.S. officials.
“The use of such chemicals is not an isolated incident, and is probably driven by Russian forces’ desire to dislodge Ukrainian forces from fortified positions and achieve tactical gains on the battlefield,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller’s office said Monday.
That assessment builds on a recent condemnation of Russia’s use of tear gas on the battlefield, which is similarly a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention. The latest rebuke accompanied a rash of new sanctions aimed at Russia’s military-industrial base, including the blacklisting of “three Russia-based entities and two individuals” in the Russian government’s chemical and biological weapons supply chain.
“Treasury has consistently warned that companies will face significant consequences for providing material support for Russia’s war, and the U.S. is imposing them today on almost 300 targets,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a Wednesday statement. “Today’s actions will further disrupt and degrade Russia’s war efforts by going after its military industrial base and the evasion networks that help supply it.”
Chloropircin is a chemical that “can cause immediate, severe inflammation of the eyes, nose and throat, and significant injuries to the upper and lower respiratory tract,” according to the National Institutes of Health. Its military usage dates back to the First World War.
“Russia’s ongoing disregard for its obligations to the CWC comes from the same playbook as its operations to poison Aleksey Navalny and Sergei and Yulia Skripal with Novichok nerve agents,” Miller’s team said.
The apparent chemical weapons violations come as Russia mounts a large-scale land war that is enabled by China’s support for the country’s defense industrial base.
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“If you look at what Russia’s done over the last year in terms of its production of munitions, missiles, tanks, and armored vehicles, it’s produced them at a faster pace than at any time in its modern history, including during the Cold War as the Soviet Union,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Monday during a World Economic Forum event. “How has it been able to do that? Because it’s getting massive inputs of machine tools, microelectronics, optics, mostly coming from China.”
Blinken protested that assistance during his trip to China last week but said he would wait to “see what actually happens” in response. Yellen’s team noted that the new sanctions targeted “entities based in the People’s Republic of China and other third countries that provide critical inputs to Russia’s military-industrial base.”