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Trump can stop their use with a solid red line

As president Trump gives Putin 50 days to stop the fighting and come to the peace negotiation table, the Ukrainian frontlines are experiencing an uptick in the use of chemical weapons, according to the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas. 

She was speaking in Brussels, and cited German and Dutch intelligence reports showing that Moscow has used chemical weapons at least 9,000 times since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine – and was now ramping up their use.

“As the intelligence services are saying this is intensifying, I think it’s [Russia’s use of chemical weapons] of great, great concern,” Kallas said. “It shows that Russia wants to cause as much pain and suffering so that Ukraine would surrender. And, you know, it’s really … unbearable.”

The intelligence services report and my own investigations have confirmed the use of chloropicrin, one of the first chemical weapons developed in WWI. This is a choking agent and designed as an incapacitant, but it has proved morbidly effective at killing the Ukraine defenders by flushing them out of trenches and foxholes to be killed in the open by artillery and direct fire. This is the only way Russian invaders have managed to make any progress in the last few months.

My concern is that with only 50 days for the Russians to make significant progress in this war, before the date Trump says he will impose devastating tariffs on Putin, they will escalate to far more deadly chemical weapons which could kill thousands.

There is credible, if unverified, evidence that Lewisite and possibly nerve agents have also been used by Russian forces. We know the Russians have a chemical weapons programme to develop Novichok nerve agents, the most deadly chemicals ever made on the planet, and used by the Russian secret service to try and assassinate double agent Sergei Skripal in my home city of Salisbury in 2018 – a year after the Russians declared to the UN they had destroyed all their chemical weapons.

If the Russians used Novichok, and why would they not, with the apparent indifference from the West and the UN to their use of other chemical weapons, they could kill thousands and possibly take huge tracts of Ukraine in the next 50 days. 

This would likely be far more effective than a tactical nuclear strike, and without the massive and prolonged contamination issues associated with nuclear fallout which would make the land uninhabitable for years – even to Russians.

We urgently need an “Obama” red line, or rather a solid “Trump” red line, to ensure that Putin does not use his most deadly chemical weapons to try and take Ukraine this summer. The “coalition of the willing” in Europe must also do the same to show a unified front to convince the Kremlin that a ceasefire and peace are their only viable options.

By ignoring the Obama red line in Syria in 2013, when Assad murdered over 1400 of his own people with the nerve agent Sarin, we enabled proliferation of these abhorrent weapons. Putin saw the West’s indifference in 2013 and is presumably the reason he is using them now. They are morbidly brilliant, abhorrent and completely indiscriminate. But if you have no morals or scruples  – and Putin has neither – you would use them all the time.

Trump can stop their use with a solid red line, and then we all must review the Chemical Weapons Convention and ensure that it is rigorously policed to remove all chemical weapons from the planet. This was what the convention was supposed to do in 1997 when most nations in the world, including the Russians, signed it.