There is something oddly Christmassy about the scene: a night-time city bathed, festooned in twinkling white lights, the smoke around them almost luminous. A shower of brilliant sparks falls calmly from the air, lighting up the dark sky – the town below seeming to celebrate something, over and over, with a spectacular firework display: flares, starbursts, dry-ice and Roman Candles.
But the visual beauty is a sick joke, the town is Bakhmut at the end of a nine-month siege, and the illuminations appear to be an attack by Russian forces with white phosphorus – so the Ukrainian government claim – one of the most lethal incendiary chemicals in use today.
WP – white phosphorus, also known colloquially as ‘Willie Pete’ – is (as many will remember from chemistry classes at school) a wax-like substance with an odd garlicky smell, named from the Greek word ‘phosphoros’, the Morning Star. An oxidiser, it reacts with the air to burst into flame, producing large quantities of smoke and reaching staggering temperatures of up to 800 degrees centigrade. It’s usually dispersed over large areas by aerial, explosive munitions: much like the ‘falling leaves’ variety of firework it so closely – and perversely – resembles.
Woe betide anyone who gets in its way. It’s almost impossible to extinguish with water or fire-extinguishers and can burn straight through metal, through roofs and through floors. As specialist John Parachini, senior international defence researcher at the Rand Corporation, pointed out, white phosphorus is ‘an incredibly deadly material when it lands on the ground,’ adding that with ‘a material that burns at this high heat… the places where you can take cover are likely not going to be cover for very long.’
Its effects on the human body, quite apart from the intense heat it generates, are catastrophic. Highly soluble in fat, it melts the skin and produces horrific burns, searing through flesh if unstopped, right down to the bone. Part of the chemical’s horror is its resilience: until its oxidising quality is completely spent it remains potentially active – as doctors have found, removing bandages from phosphorus-victims and seeing their wounds reignite. A BBC report from 2009 spoke of particles of white phosphorus ‘scorching through layer after layer of tissue until their supply of oxygen is cut off.’ Even if not burning, the report added, the ‘chemical effects of phosphorus can be absorbed deeper into the body causing multiple organ failure.’
The volunteer described ‘probably about 20 or 30 guys burning alive’
After the Israeli Defence Force used phosphorus in a heavily populated Gaza in 2008/2009, the UN Goldstone Report spoke of the chemical remaining active for up to three weeks after discharge. It quoted doctors who had treated patients for ‘apparently minor burns’ – who would then return a few days later with ‘more serious wounds’. A phosphorus burn, it would appear, has a malignant afterlife of its own.
Yet it inhabits a grey area in the field of proscribed weapons. Able to produce vast quantities of smoke, it is internationally licensed for use in camouflage operations, and this has enabled white phosphorus to escape classification as a chemical weapon. It’s increasingly employed, though, not to spread smoke but fire and destruction. Though such instances are apt to disappear in the fog of war, its use in civilian areas is firmly banned. Russia’s apparent phosphorus-bombing of an entire city would seem to fall clearly into this category.
Are there still civilians in Bakhmut? Without doubt, the population (previously 80,000) has massively dwindled since the beginning of attacks on the city last August. But only a month ago there were reports of a few thousand civilians left in the city, mainly made up of the poor, elderly and disabled. However many are still there, it defies belief that the quantities of white phosphorus apparently used against Bakhmut are for camouflaging rather than incendiary purposes. The city’s downtown – undeniably a ‘civilian area’, however many civilians remain present – looks carpeted in white-hot flame.
This is, it’s (believably) alleged, not the first use of phosphorus as an incendiary weapon since the outbreak of war in Ukraine last year. The Russian attack in Mariupol last May to flush out trapped fighters from the Azov regiment involved raining down what looked like phosphorus bombs on the Azovsztal steelworks where they had taken shelter.
As early as March 2022, Zelensky was accusing the Russians of using the chemical against Ukrainians – ‘Adults were killed again and children were killed again’ – while ITV news, in the same month, reported on its use near Kyiv. Pressed on such events, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia had ‘never violated international conventions.’ However, given that Peskov also claimed in the months leading up to February 2022 that Russia had no plans to attack its neighbour and had ‘never attacked anyone throughout its history’, these denials must be treated with some caution. The word ‘never’ appears to have a very different meaning for Peskov than for others.
This, of course, is not exclusively a Russian issue. Along with the Israeli use of white phosphorus, the US army were found to have used it offensively in their assault on Falluja in 2004. Like the IDF, they originally denied its use as an incendiary. But army leaders were subsequently undone by accounts from a US officer that they had exploited the chemical in ‘shake and bake’ manoeuvres, to dislodge insurgents from their hiding places before attacking them with explosives.
It is not, needless to say, acceptable when our allies do it and wrong when the Russians do. The 2009 UN Goldstone Report recommended phosphorus’s banning even for camouflage purposes, pointing out there were ‘other screening and illuminating means which are free from the toxicities, volatilities and hazards that are inherent in the chemical white phosphorus.’ Who would disagree?
Meanwhile, we have those pictures from Bakhmut to ponder. The apparent serenity of those falling phosphorus lights (if that is what they are) is part of their unique ability to terrorise too. As an American volunteer fighting for the Ukrainian army put it when interviewed last year: ‘It comes down extremely slow, but there’s nothing you can do and everything it touches it just incinerates.’ Recounting a phosphorus attack he witnessed on fellow troops, the volunteer described ‘probably about 20 or 30 guys burning alive, and several gunshots…A lot of guys have suicide pistols and you hear them scream. And then they would say goodbye.’
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