Russian Ministry of Defense warns of possible chemical false-flag attacks in Ukraine
And a high-ranking American official's admissions push the US foreign policy establishment into damage-control
The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) today issued a document “Regarding potential chemical provocations in Ukraine” that warned of potential false-flag chemical attacks in Ukraine to be blamed on Russia. The document was provided to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and the UN Security Council. Russia has called a Security Council meeting to discuss its alleged discovery in Ukraine of American and Ukrainian violations of international biological and chemical weapons conventions.
The document alleged that a Nevada-based “military contractor” called Forward Observations Group, which has been accused of recruiting private mercenaries to operate in Ukraine, assisted in supplying material for the potential attacks. This seems a bizarre claim in that the group’s website seems only to offer pro-Ukraine clothing and unspecified “hard goods”.
The OPCW is the primary international organization for the investigation of alleged chemical weapons violations. Interestingly, the organization has faced allegations by some of its own staff that its leadership ignored the findings of its own inspectors in Syria who found evidence that some chemical weapons attacks there appeared to have been staged to look like they were perpetrated by the Syrian government. These attacks occurred in areas of Syria under the control of anti-Assad jihadi fighters supported by the US.
Chemical attacks in Syria were a frequent occurrence for many years after the start of the war there in 2011. All of them were blamed on the Assad regime by Western countries like the United States and Britain. These attacks all came after Barack Obama drew his infamous “red line” in 2012, declaring that the one thing that would end his reluctance to get involved in the Syrian War would be Assad’s use of chemical weapons (US government cables leaked by Wikileaks later showed the US was already involved, covertly, and had been from before the start of the war).
That of course gave American-backed jihadi groups, who all wanted greater American involvement in the war, all the reason they needed to stage chemical attacks to pin on Assad. The first major one came a year and a day later in an area of Damascus called Ghouta. Assad has no reason to carry out the Ghouta attack. His forces were already advancing in the areas that were attacked, and there was already a UN mission in Syria investigating an earlier, smaller-scale chemical attack nearby. The Syrian government supported and facilitated the mission’s investigation of the Ghouta attack. The US eventually brokered a deal with the Russians to ensure that Assad decommissioned any chemical weapons stockpiles he may have had.
While Assad had no interest in provoking greater US involvement by using chemical weapons, the so-called rebels fighting for regime-change on behalf of the US did. Obama’s red line ensured that the quickest and best way to get more American funding and potential direct, overt participation in the conflict, would be to get the West to believe that Assad had conducted those very kinds of attacks (or at least to get the public to believe it in the West - the governments may have known what was going on, or directed it).
From then on, chemical attacks of various levels of lethality began occurring in Syria on a regular basis, virtually always in rebel-held territory. They were usually chlorine attacks, though some allegedly involved sarin and mustard gas. These are particularly nasty agents, producing an excruciating death for countless unfortunate, innocent Syrians caught up in the geopolitical games playing out all around them.
In 2018, Donald Trump approved a joint US, British, and French operation to lob dozens of cruise missiles into Syria after he blamed Assad for a particularly deadly chemical attack in Douma. This was one of the few large-scale military strikes ordered by Trump during his presidency. It was this attack, on Douma, that was the subject to the investigation that sparked the OPCW scandal I alluded to above. More information on what that involved can be found here and here.
After Trump came into office, I found it very interesting that it was fairly predictable that a new chemical attack would be reported within a few days of any pronouncement by Trump that the US intended to end its involvement in the war there. They were clearly timed to pour cold water on any momentum that might develop for an end to US intervention, which had ramped up in 2014 after the rise of Islamic State (ISIS).
The White Helmets, a group co-founded by James Le Mesurier, a former agent of Britain's MI6 spy agency, were fêted in the media and on a fawning Netflix documentary as a sort of homegrown civil defense group in free Syria. In fact, they were part of the West’s propaganda campaign in Syria, and some accused them of being essentially the publicity department of the Syrian jihadist group formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra, which was al Qaeda’s arm in Syria. al-Nusra were an indirect (or possibly even direct) beneficiary of US aid to “moderate rebels”. The group is now claimed to be coming to Ukraine to fight Russians, just as the Russians are recruiting Syrian fighters into the country.
The White Helmets have been accused of all kinds of things. It’s been claimed they used crisis actors in staged productions of “rescues” in government-bombed areas. People living in jihadi-controlled areas like Aleppo accused them of using people as human shields for propaganda value each time the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) or the Russians bombed jihadi positions in their liberation of the city. Some of them have been photographed interacting with Islamic State fighters. They’ve even been accused of “organ trafficking” in Syria, an outlandish claim, but what claims these days aren’t outlandish?
When Netflix’s documentary praising them won an Oscar in 2017, the Department of Homeland Security embarrassingly decided at the last minute to block the film’s 21-year-old Syrian cinematographer Khaled Khateeb, also a White Helmets volunteer, from traveling to Los Angeles to accept the award. They based their decision on unspecified “derogatory information” they’d uncovered regarding Khateeb. It was hilarious watching designer outfit-clad Hollywood types try to explain away Khateeb’s absence amid short clips of slick, manipulative Hollywood-produced melodrama from the streets of Aleppo.
Now, five years later, the Russians have issued these warnings about chemical and biological weapons in Ukraine and the possibility that other US proxies will similarly use them to conduct false-flag attacks in an attempt to drag the West further into the conflict. Of course, US authorities claim it’s Russia that may be planning chemical and/or biological weapons attacks in Ukraine, presumably due to frustration at allegedly being bogged-down by unexpectedly stiff Ukrainian resistance to their advance.
But just as Assad had no incentive to use chemical weapons in Syria, Russia has nothing to gain and everything to lose by doing so. Regardless of what one thinks of Russia’s invasion (I oppose it), it's not in any way in their interest to use chemical weapons. Nor do they need to militarily. It’s not clear that Western claims of their being bogged down and behind schedule are even true, but even if they are, Russia has one of the largest armies in the world and plenty of conventional resources if they want to commit them and change the dynamic in their favor.
And one of the few potential moral high grounds that they could conceivably claim that could get any traction in the western world would be if they could present actual evidence of a US-funded bioweapons program operating out of Ukraine. An actual chemical or biological attack in the midst of a war zone, which in the confusion of war could always be pinned on Russia by the West regardless of whether it were true, would not be in Russia’s interest. That, more than anything else, might break the (fortunate, for avoiding World War III) deadlock preventing greater NATO involvement in the conflict thus far.
Imagine the public relations coup the Russians could claim if through their invasion they provided convincing evidence of US-supplied weapons of mass destruction after the US notoriously failed to do so in Iraq following their invasion of that country. I’m not saying that’s the reality or what will actually happen. I will say that I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the reality, such is my distrust of my own government, but I don’t yet know that it is. I do know that the only thing more hazardous to Russia’s standing beyond launching the invasion itself would be their conducting a chemical weapons attack that risks further historic condemnation of them.
US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, one of the chief architects and midwives of the US-sponsored coup in Ukraine in 2014, helped hand-pick the man who would take over as prime minister (“Yats is the guy”) after the elected president Victor Yanukovych was run out of the country. This week she did something far more infamous, something potentially damaging to her career this time. To the astonishment, and likely great dismay, of the Pentagon and foreign policy establishment she (somewhat) truthfully answered a question put to her by Senator Marco Rubio in a Senate hearing — a question she was likely not supposed to answer truthfully.
Nuland admitted, somewhat haltingly, that the Russians were essentially correct in their claim of labs containing dangerous biological agents in Ukraine (“biological research facilities”, as she put it). And she further stated that these agents were so dangerous that the US was concerned about them falling into Russian hands. This answer was so explosive that it immediately prompted Rubio to ask a clarifying question, goading her into proclaiming that if a false-flag chemical attack occurs in Ukraine, there will be no doubt that it will have been conducted by Russia. 100% certainty. Everything since by US officials and their stenographers in mainstream media on this topic has been damage control. They laughably asserted that the program was about dismantling Soviet-era weapons that would have been created 30 years ago, and that the program to dismantle them has been going on for more than 15 years!
The explanations have evolved since, as they often do, but one thing is certain: Toria Nuland should update her resume. Maybe Forward Observations Group has a place for her.
Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.