Attacks on chemical and nuclear facilities in Ukraine—legal frameworks and protections

Throughout the ongoing armed conflict in Ukraine, military operations have involved chemical and nuclear facilities either as targets of attacks or as risk-prone civilian objects affected by hostilities. While attacks on chemical facilities have caused toxic pollution, no significant radiological spills have occurred, although international observers maintain a high level of concern in light of the catastrophic effects of such an event. In this context, the article outlines general provisions and special protections under international humanitarian law (IHL) applying to these facilities and briefly discusses the applicability of specialized treaty regimes. It argues that, whereas nuclear facilities receive more extensive protections under IHL compared to chemical facilities, neither framework adequately addresses the impact of attacks below a certain intensity threshold. This article advances the relatively understudied areas of specific protections for chemical facilities in armed conflict through a systematic analysis of the law, applied to specific examples and threat scenarios in the conflict in Ukraine. It posits that existing gaps in protections could be remedied by an extensive inclusion of the reverberating effects of attacks in proportionality assessments, and that this should account for less-probable secondary effects in case they potentially present an extremely high negative impact on the civilian population.