Ukraine accuses Putin’s forces of using banned weapons thousands of times but there is now a threat of deadlier agents
Matthew Campbell
January 25, 2026
The Sunday Times
Igor Kirillov emerged from his apartment block into the Moscow cold, unaware that the short walk to the car would be his last. The Russian general had taken only a few steps along the snow-encrusted pavement on December 17, 2024, before the morning was torn apart by an explosion.
Ukraine later claimed responsibility for the assassination — a remotely detonated bomb — citing Russia’s conduct in the war. Kirillov, 54, was accused of overseeing battlefield assaults that have injured thousands of Ukrainian soldiers, not with bullets or shells but with banned chemical weapons.
Russia’s use of chemical agents on the battlefield has intensified since then, underscoring how deeply entrenched such practices have become. According to the Ukrainian military, Russian forces have used hazardous chemical agents more than 9,000 times since the war began — 6,540 times last year alone. Much of this has involved grenades filled with riot-control gases such as CS and CN which are designed to be incapacitating rather than lethal but can cause serious harm.
Ukraine and European officials say Russian units have also resorted on occasion to chloropicrin, a choking agent first used in the First World War. The use of such gases violates the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993 and the 1925 Geneva Protocol, the foundational agreement of which banned chemical weapons in war. This has been highlighted by EU sanctions and by findings from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which has confirmed toxic agents in samples taken from affected areas on the Ukrainian front lines.
Western officials worry that the chemical agents reported by Ukraine may not represent the full extent of Russia’s arsenal. Moscow said in 2017 that it had destroyed its stockpiles under the Chemical Weapons Convention, but western intelligence services believe that Russia destroyed only its declared stockpile. Suspicions that it continued to research and produce chemical weapons was reinforced by the use of a novichok nerve agent against Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer in Salisbury in 2018.
The concern, voiced quietly in allied capitals, is that a prolonged or stalemated war in Ukraine could tempt the Kremlin to resort to more dangerous battlefield weapons. President Putin has repeatedly rattled the nuclear sabre while remaining conspicuously silent about chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction. “It’s being watched very closely,” said Sir Alex Younger, the former head of MI6. “For now [the Russians] don’t seem to have reverted to use of classic chemical weapons — we haven’t seen them cross that line. It’s not that they are not capable of it, obviously. We know they have the capability.”
Suspicions about Russia’s chemical capabilities were heightened after the poisoning of Alexei Navalny in 2020. The country’s most prominent opposition politician survived exposure to a nerve agent before being jailed on politically motivated charges. He died in a remote Arctic penal colony in February 2024. Russian authorities said he collapsed after feeling unwell — an account rejected by his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, who has accused the Kremlin of poisoning him with a new, harder-to-detect nerve agent.
In the wake of Navalny’s 2020 poisoning, the open-source research group Bellingcat concluded that Russia’s novichok programme had continued “long beyond the officially announced closure date”.
According to its investigation, scientists involved in developing the nerve agent were reassigned to ostensibly civilian institutes, allowing work on chemical weapons to proceed under the cover of medical and industrial research. Staff at two such bodies — the State Institute for Experimental Military Medicine and the Scientific Centre Signal — were identified as having played a central role in refining and “weaponising” novichok well into the 2010s. “It is fair to assume that Russia’s chemical weapons programme is still extant,” said Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former British army officer and commander of Nato’s rapid reaction chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear battalion. This was a matter for significant concern, he said, adding: “If novichok were used on a wider scale, it could have a massive impact.”
Two European intelligence agencies said last year that Russia was increasing its use of First World War-era chloropicrin in Ukraine. The Dutch and German secret services found the use of such chemical weapons had become “commonplace”. Ukraine says at least three of its soldiers have died from exposure to chemical agents.
Russia is accused of using the gas routinely to flush soldiers from trenches and dugouts, forcing them into the open where they can be more easily targeted. Britain has provided large quantities of gas masks to help defend troops against such attacks. The chemicals are often delivered from the air by Iranian-made “kamikaze” attack drones.
Moscow denies the allegations and insists that it is Ukraine, not Russia, that has repeatedly used chemical agents. In 2024 a Russian war correspondent was shown on state television holding up a grenade and saying: “Here is a gas grenade that we dropped.”
General Sir Richard Barrons, a former commander of Britain’s Joint Forces Command and a co-author of the UK’s strategic defence review, argues that escalation to more lethal chemical weapons would be a poor bargain for Moscow. “It would be unwise to assume they have ceased research into chemical weapons,” he said. But turning to more lethal agents would bring scant military gain and heavy costs. “You attract attention for a war crime, you run the risk of reciprocation, and there’s a double-edged sword — you may introduce your own forces to risk,” for example, if the wind changes direction.
In today’s world, he added, denial offered little protection. “Any sense that you won’t get found out is for the birds,” he said, noting that Syria’s use of sarin gas against civilians in the Ghouta
suburbs of Damascus in 2013, killing hundreds, provoked a different sort of “blowback” — international outrage that led to direct western military strikes against the regime.
The temptation to use such weapons might arise, though, Barrons said, “if you’re in a situation where the stakes are extraordinarily high, a situation where national survival is at stake”.
Matthew Campbell has covered numerous wars, natural disasters and major political stories while serving as The Sunday Times’s bureau chief in Moscow in the early 1990s and later in Washington and Par