The Kremlin is preparing to strike Ukraine with chemical weapons, an statement from a top-level Ukrainian government agency said on Thursday.
An official estimate from Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation (UCCD), a subordinate agency of the country’s National Security Council (NSC), said Russian Federation (RF) state-controlled media for days has been flooding Russian airwaves and news websites with false reports and faked stories of purported Ukrainian chemical weapons labs and the need for Moscow strike them preemptively.
Russian diplomats speaking at the United Nations (UN) on Wednesday repeated the charge, and warned other nations that Russia is a nuclear power and intervention in its war with Ukraine could bring RF retaliation.
Practically all UN delegations – aside from RF allies like North Korea and Syria – have rejected Moscow’s chemical weapons allegations against Kyiv as absurd. However, the assembly took no action against the RF.
According to the NSC estimate, the Kremlin is continuing to pour fake news reports about Ukrainian plans to use chemical weapons into all RF media outlets in order to prepare the RF population for RF use of chemical weapons in Ukraine.
The NSC prediction came two days after NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg told reporters the Atlantic Alliance is seriously concerned about possible RF use of chemical weapons in Ukraine. According to Brussels-sourced news reports, NATO is planning to send Ukraine individual chemical weapons protection suits and chemical clean-up equipment.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly attacked NATO for failing to take seriously RF threats to use nuclear or chemical weapons in Ukraine, and for effectively abandoning Ukraine to fight the RF on its own.
The question of the degree to which Ukraine can or should be supported has split the Atlantic Alliance. Some member states, Poland, Britain, the Baltics and the US, are calling for robust response and possibly even the deployment of a NATO peacekeeping to Ukraine.
Other member states, led by Germany, have that although the RF’s invasion of Ukraine is illegal and the cause of mass destruction and humanitarian disaster, NATO should do nothing to “provoke” Russia, and understand that an RF nuclear or chemical weapons strike in Ukraine would be no business of NATO’s.
