10,000 documented chemical attacks in Ukraine and almost no headlines in the news. Erosion of chemical weapons norms are evident and Russia is exquisitely balancing on the edge of what will be accepted by the international community. This piece is an overview of the current situation, exploring how repeated violations become normalized and what that means for the future of warfare and international law.
There is a saying that bad news sells. Chemical weapons, as it turns out, are an exception. Ukraine’s Security Service has documented over 10,000 Russian chemical attacks since the start of the full-scale invasion. Think about how many times you have read about in the news… That gap between the number and the silence around is a political phenomenon worth understanding.
Before analyzing why that silence exists, it’s worth knowing what kind of weapons are actually being used. When most people hear “chemical weapons”, they picture Syria: sarin dropped on civilians, children convulsing in the streets, images so horrifying that they briefly forced an international response. Or they picture Novichok, the Soviet-era nerve agent used to poison Sergei Skripal on a quiet street in Salisbury in 2018, so lethal that a local woman who later found the discarded bottle died from the exposure. These are weapons designed to kill quickly, in small quantities, with no antidote. What Russia is deploying into Ukrainian trenches is different. The agents used are primarily CS gas, the compound found in standard riot control canisters used at protests worldwide, and chloropicrin, a choking agent first deployed in the First World War, now being delivered via drones or grenades dropped directly into defensive positions. They cause respiratory failure, vomiting and disorientation. In the open air, most people survive. In a sealed underground trench, the calculus changes.
That distinction, between weapons that kill spectacularly and weapons that incapacitate quietly, is not incidental to Russia’s strategy. By staying below the threshold of mass civilian casualties, Russia avoids triggering the kind of visceral international reaction that Syrian chemical attacks eventually ignited. In theory these weapons are banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention regardless, because the CWC prohibits riot control agents when used as a method of warfare, not just agents capable of mass destruction. But “banned” and “adhered to” have turned out to be very different things, and Russia appears to have understood that before deploying them at scale. Ukrainian forces recorded 465 chemical weapon incidents from the start of full scale invasion through the end of 2023, and then 4,547 in 2024 alone. A tenfold increase in a single year is a tactic that was tried, found effective, and scaled up precisely because of the lack of an international response. It is also, in part, a consequence of how the war itself has evolved. Russia anticipated a war of days, perhaps weeks, and planned accordingly. What it got instead was a grinding war of static trenches stretching across hundreds of kilometres of eastern Ukraine, exactly the kind of warfare for which chemical agents were originally developed a century ago. A drone dropping a gas grenade into a sealed underground position does something that artillery often cannot: it makes the position uninhabitable without destroying it. As the front hardened and quick territorial gains became impossible, the utility of chemical weapons grew, and the numbers followed.
When confronted with the evidence, Russia has not meaningfully engaged with it. The response has followed a simpler playbook: deny everything, and then accuse Ukraine of doing the same thing. It’s a deliberate information strategy built on the recognition that if both sides are making accusations, outside observers tend to assume the truth lies somewhere in the middle, or that the situation is too murky to act on. Russian officials have repeatedly claimed to possess irrefutable evidence of Ukrainian chemical weapons use, without ever producing anything that independent bodies found credible. Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department has concluded every year since 2018 that Russia did not declare its full stockpile and maintains an undeclared chemical weapons programme, and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons OPCW has confirmed the presence of CS gas on Ukrainian front lines on three separate occasions, in November 2024, February 2025, and June 2025. As a response Russia questioned the process of collecting the evidence instead of contesting the findings. When you cannot argue with the facts, you argue with the method.
The international response to all of this has been real but carefully calibrated to stay well short of what the situation might seem to demand. In May 2025, the EU sanctioned three entities within the Russian Armed Forces over chemical weapons use, the first time it had done so explicitly in relation to Ukraine. OPCW member states voted to remove Russia from the organisation’s Executive Council. These are meaningful diplomatic signals. They are also, against the backdrop of 10,000 documented attacks, a remarkably feeble set of consequences. The contrast with Salisbury is instructive: the use of a nerve agent against two people on a British street triggered coordinated reactions across twenty-five countries within weeks. The difference is that without Russia’s cooperation, and given its veto on the UN Security Council, the mechanisms that worked elsewhere simply cannot be replicated here. Western governments have, for reasons tied to managing escalation in a nuclear context, chosen not to treat chemical weapons use on the battlefield as a category requiring a qualitatively different kind of response. Every time that choice is made, it becomes slightly easier to make it again.
Syria is the clearest illustration of where that logic leads. Throughout its civil war, Bashar al-Assad’s government used sarin and chlorine against civilian populations on multiple occasions, killing hundreds. The international community responded with condemnation, then with a U.S.-Russia brokered agreement to remove Syria’s declared chemical stockpiles, then with targeted missile strikes when the attacks continued anyway. None of it stopped the use. Syria kept deploying chemical weapons, faced consequences that fell short of being decisive, and continued. Russia drew its own conclusions about how much the international community’s willingness to enforce chemical weapons norms could actually be tested before something decisive happened. And the answer Syria demonstrated was: quite a lot.
History has a word for when prohibited behaviour becomes repeated enough that it stops feeling prohibited and it’s normalisation. It doesn’t require anyone to formally endorse what is happening. It only requires that responses become proportionally smaller as incidents become proportionally larger, until the 10,001st attack registers as barely news. Chemical weapons were banned not because states lacked the technical capacity to use them, but because the international community decided collectively that some tools of war are beneath the conduct of war itself. International consensuses are never self-enforcing and they depend on states being willing to treat each violation as a threat to the norm. What is being tested in eastern Ukraine is whether that willingness still exists. The answer, so far, is ambiguous enough to be alarming.
I’m a BIG student from Warsaw, Poland — the real-life Carrie Bradshaw (if she swapped New York for Milan and stilettos for climbing shoes). Passionate about bridge, cooking, history and talking about movies like it’s a full-time job.
