I’m going to do it, but I accuse you that you’re going to do it. Or that you already did. That is the communication technique of the “reversed mirror”. It is used in the 21st century by all authoritarian and populist regimes to justify their actions. And although it has been readapted by modern marketers, it is as old as espionage. In the Kremlin, there are passionate followers of this reversed mirror. They are great masters of technique.

On Wednesday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Russia had documents showing the United States had supported a biological weapons program in Ukraine, including plague, cholera and anthrax. While the Russian Defense Ministry accused “Ukrainian nationalists” of preparing a “provocation” with chemical weapons in a town northwest of Kharkiv. The plan is, Putin officials said, to falsely accuse Russian forces of using chemical weapons.

Extraordinary statements come from the country that regularly uses biological and chemical weapons in all the conflicts where it intervenes, from Syria to Chechnya. It has an arsenal of at least 40,000 tons of chemical weapons. It also uses them selectively to eliminate or poison dissidents, from Alexander Litvinenko to Alexei Navalny.

Both Washington and Kyiv emphatically denied that they had developed such programs and called the accusations “absurd”. “Russia has a history of accusing the West of the same violations that Russia itself is perpetrating,” Jen Psaki, the White House spokeswoman, tweeted. “This is all a blatant ploy by Russia to try to justify its new premeditated, unprovoked and unwarranted attack on Ukraine.”

Russia has been using especially lethal weapons in Ukraine, such as thermobaric vacuum bombs that cause serious damage to the human body due to the intensity of their explosive bursts. War paraphernalia that Putin’s forces tested in Syria as if it were a large open-air laboratory when they intervened to save Bashar al Assad’s regime. The bombing of the city of Aleppo, controlled by pro-Western rebels and jihadist militias, was particularly brutal and used both poison-laden bombs and cluster bombs, which are prohibited by a treaty signed by 193 countries.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) registered 17 attacks with chemical-biological weapons perpetrated by the Syrian regime and by Russian forces in Syria. There is extensive evidence of the use of chlorine bombs against the civilian population in several of the cities controlled by the opposition. In August 2013, Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, was hit by rockets containing the chemical agent sarin. There were almost 2,000 dead and it was the deadliest attack with this type of weapon since the war between Iran and Iraq. At that time, Saddam Hussein also used them profusely against his own people. And in April 2017, there was another chemical attack in Khan Sheikhoun, near the city of Idlib. There, 89 people died and another 541 were left with serious health problems. In all cases, the poisons are suspected to have been supplied by the government of Vladimir Putin. In that Syrian scenario, Russia also used the “reverse mirror” technique. For example, in April 2018, without evidence, he accused Britain of being behind a chlorine attack in Douma that killed 40 people.

But now, all this can turn for Putin into a misfortune like the one they say happens when the mirror breaks. Any use of chemical weapons by Russian forces would enable the West to intervene. This is how the British government interprets it and it is an approach shared by several analysts in Washington. James Heappey, minister for the armed forces in Boris Johnson’s government, said NATO might consider a change in approach if President Putin were to deploy such weapons in his war against Ukraine. “I don’t think it’s helpful to make a firm commitment at this point in time about where the red line is,” Heappey told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “But I think that President Putin must be very clear that when other countries have used chemical weapons, that has provoked an international response … And I think he should reflect very urgently on what has happened to other countries where they have used this.”

And a spokesperson from 10 Downing ST. told reporters that “obviously we and our allies will continue to monitor the situation closely, given the record of Russia and its proxies in the use of chemical weapons, and the false accusations that the Russian government has been making about others who they develop them.”

In Syria, the opposition to Al Assad already knows what it is about. Since 2015, when Russia began a prominent involvement in the conflict, and throughout the gruesome years that followed, claims that they, rather than the Assad regime, had used chemical weapons were known to be a staged smear that put them on notice of an imminent attack. The accusations were made by Moscow every time the ground forces it supported wanted to clear a town or city. This was followed by brutal and indiscriminate bombardment including chemical weapons. And also impunity.

Even at its inception, the Russian war in Ukraine had many parallels to the conflict in Syria: barely contained savagery, mass flight of terrified civilians, and wanton destruction. Now the use of prescient pretexts can be added to a growing list, which was born among the ruins of Grozny, Crimea and Donbas and was refined on the civilian population of besieged northern Syria.

“Ukraine today is part of a historical continuum that goes beyond Syria,” a former senior NATO official told The Guardian. “It goes back further than Chechnya in terms of foreign policy, in terms of internal Russian dynamics and in terms of the tactics of the Russian war machine.”

“Impunity and the conviction that nothing can affect him put Putin in a psychological position in which he believed he could do the same as in Syria. He learned to disregard international red lines. The sustained and overwhelming use of heavy bombing aimed at undermining the confidence of the population and as a tool of intimidation that is being seen in Mariupol was perfected in Syria, where Russia hardly used precision-guided munitions, ”added the now-retired former military man and who studied Russian positions for NATO for years.

In this context, analysts agree that Putin will not do anything different from what he has already done and experienced in Syria or Chechnya. And in those two wars, he used chemical weapons.