the times | Wednesday April 13 2022 2GM 9News
Britain and America are investigating
reports that Russian forces carried out
chemical attacks against Ukrainian sol-
diers defending Mariupol.
The alleged use of a “poisonous sub-
stance” in the city came after a spokes-
man for pro-Moscow forces threatened
to use chemicals to “smoke out” re-
maining resistance fighters.
However, western chemical weapons
experts expressed doubts about the
alleged attack, saying that evidence to
corroborate accounts was scant and
difficult to verify.
Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, said
yesterday: “We are working urgently
with partners to verify details.”
Hours later the Pentagon confirmed
that it was also monitoring the “deeply
concerning” accusations. John Kirby, a
spokesman for the US defence depart-
ment, said: “We are aware of social me-
dia reports which claim Russian forces
deployed a potential chemical muni-
tion in Mariupol, Ukraine.
“These reports, if true, are deeply
concerning and reflective of concerns
that we have had about Russia’s potent-
ial to use a variety of riot control agents,
including tear gas mixed with chemical
agents, in Ukraine.”
Ukrainian troops claimed that Rus-
sian forces “used a poisonous substance
of unknown origin against Ukrainian
forces and civilians”, although the
effects were not severe.
The Ukrainian Azov battalion, which
is defending Mariupol, reported that
three people showed signs of chemical
poisoning after a Russian drone
dropped a toxic substance on the city.
Andriy Biletsky, the nationalist
leader of the volunteer group, said they
suffered from shortness of breath and
irregular muscle movements. The bat-News
Moscow accused of
chemical attack by
drone on city fighters
Charlie Parker, Richard Lloyd Parry,
David Rosetalion released a video of the alleged
victims. They did not appear seriously
harmed and observers questioned if
their symptoms were that of a chemical
attack.
Serhiy Orlov, deputy mayor of Mari-
upol, told the BBC that the city council
had confirmed a “chemical poisoning”
delivered by a Russian drone.
The report came after a statement by
a spokesman for Russian proxy forces
in the Donetsk region, who are trying
to drive the Azov battalion out of Mari-
upol's Azovstal steel mill.
Eduard Basurin said: “We should
figure out how to block this mill and
find all ways in and out. And after that
we should ask our chemical forces to
find a way to smoke these moles out of
their holes.” He told the Interfax news
agency that chemical agents had not
been used in Mariupol.
Eliot Higgins, founder of the Belling-
cat investigative agency, said that the
symptoms described in the video were
“inconsistent with any nerve agent I’m
familiar with, with no reports of pupil
constriction or dilation, convulsions”.
Pytor Andryushchenko, an adviser
to the Mariupol city government, said:
“From a drone, something was dropped
in that area and some chemical things
were in it.” He told The New York Times:
“But we don’t know for sure if it was poi-
son or something else.”
Ned Price, a Pentagon spokesman,
said: “There was credible information
available to us that the Russians may
have been preparing to use agents,
chemical agents, potentially tear gas
mixed with other agents, as part of an
effort to weaken, to incapacitate the
Ukrainian military and civilian ele-
ments that are entrenched in Mariu-
pol.”
Ukraine’s deputy defence minister,
Hanna Malyar, said Kyiv was investi-
gating the claims.Putin’s right-hand man in
Ukraine finally captured
Maxim Tuckermat for ‘pro-Kremlin’ German president
tant that Ukraine, together with Ger-
many and the entire European Union,
show a united face against the Russian
invasion. I hope that the president’s
visit to Kyiv is only postponed and that
it can be done in the coming weeks.”
A Ukrainian diplomat told Bild: “We
all know Steinmeier’s close ties to
Russia, which were also shaped by the
Steinmeier formula. He is currently not
welcome in Kyiv. We’ll see if that
changes again.”
Three German politicians visited
Ukraine yesterday. Marie-Agnes
Strack-Zimmermann of the neoliberal
Free Democratic Party, Michael Roth
of Chancellor Scholz’s Social Demo-
crats and Anton Hofreiter of the
Greens met members of the Ukrainian
parliament in the west of the country,according to a report in Der Spiegel
magazine, confirmed by a spokesman
for Roth. All three are members of the
ruling traffic-light coalition but have
criticised Germany’s sluggish response
to the war in Ukraine. They have called
for faster weapons deliveries, which
Ukraine sees as essential to breaking
the siege of Mariupol.
After visits by several senior figures
in recent days, including Boris Johnson
and Ursula von der Leyen, president of
the European Commission, critics have
asked why Olaf Scholz has not made
the trip. While Johnson was “walking
side by side with Ukrainian president
Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv” on Satur-
day, “Scholz was waving at an election
campaign rally in Lübeck” in the run-
up to a regional vote, Bild noted.2016, which attempted to put the Minsk
accords between Russia and Ukraine
into practice and called for special
elections in the separatist eastern
territories of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Putin recognised the independence
of these territories shortly before
Russia’s invasion in late February, in an
attempt to justify the military action.
The German president was defended
by Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv,
who is a Zelensky loyalist. “It is true that
in the past the president has made
many mistakes in Russia policy, which
massively harmed Ukraine. For this,
the president has apologised and ad-
mitted his mistakes. It is urgent that we
as Ukraine continue to build bridges to
Germany,” he told Bild.
“Right now it is enormously impor-PHOTOGRAPHS: DIEGO
HERRERA CARCEDO/
ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY
IMAGESAiden Aslin, left,
was reported to
have said he had
no choice but to
surrender after
48 days in
Mariupol. To the
north, a Russian
rocket landed,
but did not
detonate, in
Lysychansk.
Right: a
Ukrainian soldier
on the front line
in Donbasacross the border since he came to
power. The Kremlin has been kind to
him in return. When Russia annexed
Crimea in 2014, Medvedchuk paid only
$40,000 for shares in a Russian oil re-
finery, Yug Energo, which has netted
him tens of millions of dollars in profits,
according to the Organised Crime and
Corruption Reporting Project.
Before Zelensky’s election in 2019,
the oligarch was accused of buying up
Ukrainian media outlets and using
them to broadcast Kremlin talking
points, with the apparent aim of
bolstering support for pro-Russian
parties at the polls.
After the election, Zelensky’s
administration sought to curb
Medvedchuk’s influence, placing
sanctions first on the media out-
lets and then on the oligarch and
his family.
Originally a lawyer, Medved-
chuk came to prominence
through his defence of dis-
sidents during Soviet
show trials. He was
elected to Ukraine’s
parliament in 1997 and
became the head of
Leonid Kuchma’s presi-
dential administration
in 2002. Shortly after-
wards he first met Putin.President Putin’s right-hand man in
Ukraine was captured last night.
President Zelensky shared a photo-
graph of Viktor Medvedchuk, an
oligarch known as the “Grey Cardinal”
who has pulled the strings behind pro-
Russian political forces in Ukraine for
two decades, handcuffed and forlorn in
a Ukrainian military uniform.
Medvedchuk had been held under
house arrest since last year on treason
charges over accusations of attempting
to steal natural resources from Crimea
after its annexation by Russia and of
handing Ukrainian military secrets to
Moscow.
However, he was thought to
have fled after Putin invaded
Ukraine on February 24.
Medvedchuk is the chairman of
the Opposition Platform — For
Life, a pro-Kremlin party, and
was elected to represent it
as an MP in 2019.
Putin is godfather to
his youngest daughter
and has relied on him to
represent his interestsViktor Medvedchuk
was shown wearing
a Ukrainian uniform