Day of Remembrance for all Victims of Chemical Warfare
The Day of Remembrance for all Victims of Chemical Warfare, observed by the United Nations on November 30, represents humanity’s commitment to a future free of chemical weapons. In 2023 especially, this day is an opportunity to mark the progress that has been achieved – and to call attention to the proliferation risks that still remain. Amid the war in Ukraine, November 30 reminds us that, for at least a decade, Russia has stood as the greatest impediment to the global elimination of perhaps the cruelest instruments of death ever invented. The vast majority of continued possession and deployment of substances banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) is only possible due to Russia. Thus, this day also represents the threat of the Putin regime, to not only Ukraine but the entire world.
First, some good news, as a reminder that progress is indeed possible: 2023 has been a particularly significant year for chemical weapons eradication because, on July 7, the United States finally finished destroying its arsenal. Upon ratification of the CWC in 1997, the US declared the second-largest stockpile in the world at over 30,000 tons, built up during the Cold War. Disarmament was an extremely arduous process (with multiple missed deadlines) that required finding innovative methods to dispose of highly dangerous toxins, including nerve agents like sarin and VX, without harming the environment and local communities.
Russia, for its part, announced the completed destruction of its stockpile in 2017, which in 1997 was the world’s largest at around 40,000 tons. Of those, around 80 percent was reported to consist of nerve agents, while the rest was largely blister agents like mustard gas and lewisite. Nevertheless, events since then have made clear that Russia still has illegal chemical weapons. Even before 2017, Putin already had a long history of poisoning his internal critics, including journalist and politician Yuri Shchekochikhin in 2003, journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2004 (who survived but was assassinated by shooting two years later), and FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.
Litvinenko had been serving as an advisor to the British government and was killed in London, but Putin’s poisonings were still not treated as an international chemical weapons issue until the attempted assassination in the UK of defector Sergei Skripal in 2018. Skripal, his daughter, and two others became seriously ill from being poisoned with Novichok, a Soviet-era series of nerve agent; British citizen Dawn Sturgess ultimately died. Coming a year after Russia officially declared itself chemical weapons-free, it was an unmistakable sign that the regime had no intention of respecting international law. In response, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW, the intergovernmental body empowered to enforce the CWC), listed several substances in the Novichok series under Schedule I of the convention. According to the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, “as toxic chemicals without any legitimate use, all types of Novichok agents are already prohibited under the CWC. But expanding the schedules to cover [Novichok] will facilitate treaty verification and export controls.” Even so, this was not enough to deter Putin: Novichok was used again two years later in an attempt to kill Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent dissident.
For Ukraine and its friends abroad, what is especially critical to understand is that Russia also employs poisoning to further its imperialist foreign policy, as part of its asymmetric war to keep post-Soviet states within its orbit by suppressing liberalizing elements in their politics. Most notably, Russia was very likely behind the attempted murder of Viktor Yushchenko, then the pro-Western candidate running in Ukraine’s 2004 presidential election, by poisoning with a dioxin. Former President of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili, who came to power after leading a democratic “color” revolution in 2003 and resisted Russia’s invasion in 2008, and who has been incarcerated since 2021, has also claimed he was poisoned in prison by Russian agents. (After his presidency, Saakashvili went into self-imposed exile in Ukraine and served as Governor of Odesa oblast before his 2021 return to and arrest in Georgia; he holds Ukrainian citizenship.) As recently as March 2022, multiple participants in peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine displayed symptoms of poisoning, including Ukraine’s now-Minister of Defense Rustem Umierov.
Russia is also confirmed to have used chemical weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine in at least one instance, when state TV reported in May 2023 that Russian forces had released riot control agent on Ukrainian positions in the village of Spirne. Although technically (by omission) permitted for controlling civilian crowds, Article I of the CWC unambiguously bans military use of such substances. Russia’s brazen admission to violating the CWC signals that it has no compunction about using illegal weapons in the future, and very possibly more lethal ones at that. Ukrainian authorities have also claimed that on multiple occasions Russia has used illegal chemicals, such as chloropicrin, which functions as an irritant and is banned under Schedule III of the CWC.
Moreover, Russia has enabled large-scale chemical warfare, undoubtedly the worst of the 21st century, by the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s civil war. In 2013, after a sarin attack on the opposition-held Damascus suburb of Ghouta killed hundreds of civilians, Putin intervened to protect his ally in the face of international condemnation. Ultimately, Russia pledged to guarantee Syria’s cooperation with the OPCW in verifying and destroying its arsenal. Syria joined the CWC (having previously been one of a few holdouts), and in 2014 the OPCW announced that the country’s declared chemical weapons stockpile was 94 percent destroyed. However, it soon became painfully obvious that Russia’s “guarantee” was merely window-dressing, meant to allow Syria to retain some quantity of chemical weapons while claiming not to have any, just as Russia itself would later do. Syria has since conducted more chemical attacks, including on the town of Khan Shaykhun in 2017, where at least 87 people died; the OPCW found that sarin or a similar nerve agent was used. The following year, another attack on Douma killed at least forty. Russia has continued to run interference for Assad by repeatedly vetoing UN Security Council efforts to facilitate further inspections by international experts, and by spreading misinformation via state media that denies the Syrian government’s culpability for attacks.
November 30 is an opportunity to spread awareness of Russia’s extensive history of violating international law on chemical weapons – both through using them itself, and through its complicity in Syria’s atrocities. This could not be stronger evidence that Russia has no respect for laws and norms, and cannot be trusted to keep its promises. Those who suggest Ukraine “negotiate” with the invader would do well to remember that.
Photo: 1914, World War 1. The Dome Hospital, showing some of the 689 beds in the whole hospital. Photographer: H. D. Girdwood. Powered by British Library on Unsplash
Author: Benjamin Reicher, Pomona College, United States of America
