On the evening of April 11, members of the Ukrainian Azov regiment defending the port city of Mariupol claimed that the Russians had used “a poisonous substance of unknown origin”. On social networks, the Belarusian Telegram channel Nexta described victims suffering from“respiratory failure” and of “syndrome vestibulo-atactique”.
A video of the Azov regiment, founded by far-right activists, was later posted on Telegram on Tuesday, showing three alleged victims. These describe a “White smoke” coming from a factory (it would be a steel mill run by the Ukrainians) and various symptoms: tinnitus, tachycardia, difficulty breathing, dizziness and, for an elderly woman, loss of consciousness.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he took the allegation very seriously and the UK said it was investigating the matter.
Other possible hypotheses
However, observers relayed by The Guardian consider for the time being that this use has not been demonstrated.
In a series of tweets (below), Dan Kaszeta, a chemical weapons expert, “warned that it was still difficult to diagnose remotely and asked why in the original post [de Nexta]an expression as precise as ‘vestibulo-atactic syndrome’ had been used, summarizes the newspaper. According to him, conventional or incendiary weapons could also have “cause chemical problems through fires and explosions” in an industrial environment.
Eliot Higgins, founder of the Netherlands-based investigative journalism site Bellingcat, says on Twitter than the symptoms described in the video “do not correspond to any chemical weapon [qu’il] know, there is no question of narrowing or dilation of the pupils, of convulsions”.
He considers that it will be difficult to prove the use of chemical weapons, even if it would be possible in principle to recover the ammunition, these not having vocation to explode but to release toxic substances.