Russia Deploys Forbidden Gas Attacks In Ukraine
Honor Phillips spoke with Ukrainian soldiers and volunteer medics about Russian gas attacks on the frontlines.
A damaged gas mask lies on the pavement at a Russian position which was overrun by Ukrainian forces outside Kyiv, Ukraine, March 31, 2022. Image/VadimGhirda/AP
In a world where war and brutality are becoming increasingly commonplace, it is both easy and dangerous to disengage oneself from what is happening. It is when the public eye is uninterested or distracted from a conflict that the worst violations of international law take place.
Russia has stacked up a remarkable list of war crimes and violations of international law which they perpetrate daily in their ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Included are abduction and deportation of children, systemic torture, consistent attacks on civilians, and the overlooked wide scale use of banned gas and chemical weapons across the country.
There are Standards of Conduct in War
Since its full scale invasion, the Russian army has crossed the line in a way that we have not seen from a world power in decades. But war is war, right, and bad things happen? The very nature of war is violent, bringing out the worst in people and nations, but there are still standards of conduct that countries must be held accountable to. The death of tens of millions of people and two devastating World Wars were the foundation for Western culture to prohibit certain actions in wartime. One of those banned acts is the use of gas and chemical weapons in combat.
The indiscriminate, torturous way gas functions on the battle field was burned onto the collective consciousness of the West during the First World War. Uncontrollable clouds of poison gas left its victims blistered and pockmarked, in internal and external pain. Tens of thousands died an excruciating death from the gas attacks. After WW1, there was a virtually unanimous cry of never again.
In 2013, the world was put once again face to face with the horrors of chemical weapons attacks when the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad loosed the nerve agent Sarin on the civilian population of Ghouta, near Damascus. The indiscriminate gas attack left its suffocating victims convulsing and vomiting or frothing at the mouth. Over one thousand people died.
Conventional weapons kill and maim, but gas and chemical weapons function more as a means of indiscriminate torture and terror.
That brings us to Ukraine, where the Russian army is dropping copious amounts of prohibited chemical weapons including CS tear gas on Ukrainian positions as they try to occupy more ground. CS gas falls under the Chemical Weapons Convention which bars its use in wartime. The CWC, to which Russia is a signatory, is the inheritor to the original Geneva Protocol of 1925 which was formed in the wake of World War One. CS gas is not always as lethal as the chemical agents used in the First World War or the Sarin mentioned above, but it is strictly prohibited in combat for the same reasons.
The Russian army is in direct violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention and international law. A recent report from the Ukrainian army said that there have been over 1000 gas and chemical weapon attacks recorded since the 2022 invasion. 250 of those took place in February of this year alone.
The deployment of gas in its war on Ukraine is not something that Moscow even attempts to hide, and Kremlin sanctioned media even openly discusses it. One Russian brigade commander gloated on a state backed channel that Ukrainian defenders were unable to protect themselves from a Russian gas attack, where he claimed Russian forces used K-51 gas canisters to “smoke out“ the Ukrainian troops.
Ukrainian servicemen of the National Guard take part in drills near Kharkiv Image/Reuters
“Consistent Gas Attacks”
Lack of ammunition, equipment, and personnel have led to a very difficult situation for Ukrainian defenders in 2024. Russia is taking advantage of these shortages and delays by pressing Ukrainian positions and capitalizing on their extensive personnel and fire power disadvantage. The addition of Russian gas attacks on already hard pressed Ukrainian brigades makes a bad situation even worse.
At present, Russians forces are regularly dropping gas canisters by drone onto Ukrainian positions. CS gas is heavier than air so it sinks into the trenches making it impossible to breathe without functional gas masks. Many Ukrainian soldiers are not equipped with effective gas protective equipment, so are left with limited options. While the gas is not always initially lethal, it leads to choking and incapacitation or asphyxiation and bodily shut down. When the choking Ukrainian soldiers escape the gas filled trenches to find pure air, they are met by more drones with explosives or artillery fire.
To get a better understanding of what this means for Ukrainian defenders on the ground, I spoke with several volunteers and Ukrainian soldiers. Rebekah Maciorowski is a volunteer combat medic serving with Ukrainian brigades along the front line. She and her team are repeatedly treating Ukrainian soldiers who have had gas and chemical weapons deployed on them.
“There have been consistent gas attacks. As soon as this started happening, everyone was aware of it, but the outside media wasn’t taking it seriously,” Maciorowski told me. “It absolutely happens weekly, sometimes daily.”
“It happens on every section of the brigade. They’ll do it to the communications platoons; they’ll do it to the electronic warfare platoons; they’ll do it to the mortar men. They do it everywhere.”
Another international volunteer with the Ukrainian army told me that from his experience CS gas seems to be favored by the Russian army because of its minimal footprint, making it easier for Russian soldiers to operate in the area not long after deploying the gas. In addition, he said he had seen a variety of identifiable and unidentifiable chemicals used as early as the occupation of Bucha and Irpin in 2022.
“Smoking Them Out”
Some Ukrainian soldiers are equipped with old Soviet era gas masks with filters containing asbestos. They are also often ineffective against gas. The gas attacks exploit the difficulties inherent in the kind of trench warfare that is taking place across the Ukrainian front line.
“They are essentially smoking them out of their positions and then covering them with artillery. They are followed up, obviously, by corrected artillery, which means not only do you have a gas attack with respiratory patients, but you also have potentially dead, and absolutely wounded from the artillery.” Maciorowski said.
“So in addition to worrying about those wounded from the gas itself, which there are quite a few, particularly as a lot of our newer soldiers are actually older soldiers who have extensive past medical history, then you also have to worry about the wounds from when the guys don’t have a gas mask, and they try and get out of the covered part of the trench where the gas cans are usually dropped.”
Well trained combat medics like Maciorowski and her team are vital components to Ukrainian combat brigades on the front lines. But the emergency equipment needed to combat the effects of the gas attack, like oxygen canisters, are not readily available in forward positions. The challenges with mobility and equipment, combined with the nature of the fighting, make their options limited when working with soldiers affected by both a gas attack and blast wounds from explosives.
“In terms of treatment, sadly there’s not a lot we can do,” she explained. “Preventative medicine is best, so getting guys gas masks is of the most priority. But sadly, when they do die from gas attacks, it is typically a respiratory problem, and they turn blue because they’re just not able to breathe.”
RG-PO chemical grenade Image/Ukrainian Armed Forces
Discarding International Law
Whether through torture, forced “re-education” camps, massed bloody assaults, or illegal gas attacks, Moscow’s tactics are increasingly fitting the moniker, “by whatever means necessary.” We appear to be entering a world where Russia not only breaks international law and the rules of war, but is fundamentally discarding them for the concept of might is right. These kinds of actions are not new to the Russian army, but they are compounded in its war on Ukraine.
In 2013, President Barack Obama said there would be “enormous consequences” if the Syrian government of Bashir al-Assad used chemical weapons. The much touted redline proved to be meaningless when the Assad regime used the nerve agent Sarin to attack the Ghouta district of Damascus killing hundreds of civilians. The redline turned out to be flexible when it came to the Obama administration’s response.
Vladimir Putin was, and still is, closely aligned with the Assad government. He too acts on the principle that with the right amount of intimidation and distraction there will be no accountability for his blatant violations of international law. Russia’s use of CS gas can reasonably been seen as the first step toward a broader use of weapons that are illegal or banned in wartime.
Despite the wide spread use by Russian forces of CS gas and other chemical weapons in Ukraine, there has been little public recognition or condemnation of it.
Training and equipment help mitigate the consequences of the gas attacks, but the hard reality facing Ukrainian troops remains. As they have throughout this whole war, Ukrainians will adapt, however, Ukraine’s allies must pay close attention. If Russia is allowed to succeed in its war aims in Ukraine, the West must be prepared for an increasingly land hungry Russia, unencumbered by conventions like the CWC, international law, or the rules of war. If Moscow were to make good on their desire to reestablish “historic Russian borders,” Poland, the Baltics, and Europe must be prepared for future Russian aggression on their own territory, and that would include gas and chemical weapons attacks.
