Gasping, choking. On Ukraine’s frontline, the country’s soldiers report what statistics show: a persistent use of chemical weapons, mostly teargas, whose deployment on the battlefield is illegal. The US and UK go further in their accusations and say Russia is using another toxic agent, chloropicrin, first employed to gruesome effect in the trenches of the first world war.
Behind the effort are the radiological, chemical and biological defence troops of the Russian ministry of defence, known as RKhBZ. The US and UK say they are a specialised unit, responsible in part for the use of chemicals on the battlefield, and their head was Igor Kirillov, killed in Moscow by a bomb hidden in a scooter, in an attack that was carried out by Kyiv.
