Argument: Chemical weaponsHow Putin Borrowed a Page from Assad’s Chemical Weapon Playbook

Published 21 September 2020

Russia use of Novichock to poison opposition leader Alexei Navalny highlights a problem against which Western countries have not yet been able to devise an effective policy: the use of chemical weapons by authoritarian regimes against domestic regime critics. Preventing Russia, or any other autocratic ruler, from using poisons against domestic opponents is a tall order, Gregory D. Koblentz writes, but “Understanding the motivations of authoritarian leaders, and the intensity of their concerns about regime security, however, is the first step towards devising an effective strategy for deterring their use of chemical, and possibly someday biological, weapons against their own people.”

Germany’s announcement on 2 September that the chemical used to poison Alexei Navalny, the most prominent opposition figure in Russia today, was a member of the Novichok family of nerve agents confirms what most observers suspected all along: that the Russian government was responsible for the sudden illness that overtook Navalny while he was traveling from Siberia to Moscow on 20 August.

Gregory D. Koblentz writes in GlobalBiodefense that

The poisoning of Navalny, who is currently recovering in a German hospital, is only the latest addition to the tragically long list of dissidents and critics, in both Russia and abroad, who have been poisoned by the Kremlin.  While the use of a Novichok agent would appear to draw unwanted attention to the poisoning of Putin’s most high-profile critic, that was most likely the point. Putin, who most likely views the recent unprecedented mass protests against President Aleksandr Lukashenko in neighboring Belarus with a great deal of trepidation, is exploiting the special dread associated with poison and capitalizing on the implausible deniability associated with the use of a Novichok agent to send a clear signal to the political opposition in Russia: defy me and you will die. This approach bears an eerie similarity to the strategy that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has perfected over the course of that country’s civil war. Putin, like Assad, views chemical weapons as a useful means of repression in service of regime security and brazenly violates the international treaty that bans these weapons as a means of intimidating the opposition to his regime.

Koblentz notes that authoritarian leaders, who rely heavily on coercive means to remain in power, are frequently more worried about internal threats to their regime than foreign threats. “While authoritarian leaders such as Putin, Assad, Kim Jong Un, Saddam Hussein, and P.W. Botha have valued the contribution of these types of weapons to national security, they have also considered these weapons, particularly chemical weapons, as tools to be used against domestic threats to the survival of their regime,” he writes.

Preventing Russia, or any other autocratic ruler, from using poisons against domestic opponents is a tall order, Koblentz writes, but “Understanding the motivations of authoritarian leaders, and the intensity of their concerns about regime security, however, is the first step towards devising an effective strategy for deterring their use of chemical, and possibly someday biological, weapons against their own people.”