British Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned on Thursday that Russia may deploy chemical weapons in Ukraine, echoing the fears of other top Western officials that come as Moscow spreads unfounded propaganda about the US or Ukraine having such weapons on the ground.
“I’ll make you one other prediction, by the way, which is that the stuff that you’re hearing about chemical weapons, is straight out of their playbook,” Johnson told Sky News’ Beth Rigby. “They start saying that there are chemical weapons that have been stored by their opponents or by the Americans. And so when they themselves deploy chemical weapons, as I fear they may, they have as a sort of a maskirovka, a fake story ready to go.”
Johnson referenced maskirovka, a term for Russian military deception, that uses a mix of confusion, denial, and outright lies to defend an attack. The US and Western intelligence repeatedly warned that Russia would use false pretexts to justify a large-scale invasion of Ukraine, which is exactly what Vladimir Putin did when he argued that his forces were “de-nazifying” the nation or that Ukraine, which renounced nuclear weapons in 1994, may try to build them.
An international chemical weapons watchdog found that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government used chemical weapons against his own people three times in 2017. The US has accused Russia, which backs Assad, of thwarting investigations into the attacks and defending a regime that was supposed to have eliminated its chemical weapon stockpiles.
Russia also accused the West of staging the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, despite significant evidence that the attack was ordered by the Kremlin. Germany has said Russia used Novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent, against Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most prominent opponent, in 2020.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki and other top US officials have also warned that Russia is trying to create a false narrative that would provide cover or justification for the use of chemical weapons.
“Now that Russia has made these false claims, and China has seemingly endorsed this propaganda, we should all be on the lookout for Russia to possibly use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine, or to create a false flag operation using them,” Psaki wrote on Twitter. “It’s a clear pattern.”
Insider reporter Henry Dyer contributed to this report.
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