Nikki Haley, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is tired of debating whether Russia is responsible for the attempted assassination of a former spy in England, a poisoning British authorities regard as a violation of international bans against the use of chemical weapons.
“I will not engage in an argument over self-evident facts,” Haley told the U.N. Security Council during a Wednesday afternoon meeting. “I will not trade accusations of shameful behavior with those who have no shame.”
Russia has spent weeks accusing the United Kingdom of staging an attack on Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer who was granted British citizenship after working as a double agent for the U.K. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons corroborated the U.K.’s assessment that Skripal was stricken by “a military-grade nerve agent” known as a Novichok, originally developed by the Soviet Union.
“If chemical weapons can appear in a small English town, where might they start appearing next?” she warned. “None of us will be immune from this threat unless we immediately start rebuilding our consensus against chemical weapons.”
Western and Russian diplomats have sparred repeatedly in recent weeks over the use of chemical weapons, as the Skripal case and reports of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s gas attacks dominated United Nations debates. But Haley’s Russian counterpart disputed the OPCW’s findings and reiterated the charge that the United Kingdom is trying to frame Russia.
“The promptness of the analysis produced by the OPCW only confirms that such a substance could be produced in any laboratory equipped with the relevant equipment,” Ambassador Vasily Nebenzia told the Security Council.
The Russian diplomat argued that the Skripal case was the latest example of Britain falsely blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin for the poisoning of Russian defectors, dating back to the 2006 death of Alexander Litvinenko. “We see how cunning you are,” Nebenzia said, per the U.N. translator. “And we agree with you on one point: There will be no impunity and the perpetrators of the provocation must be held accountable.”
Litvinenko, himself a former spy, had accused the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, of staging the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings. It was an explosive charge for Putin, the former FSB director who — having become prime minister weeks before the bombing — blamed terrorists for the incident and launched the Second Chechen War, a campaign that caused his public approval ratings to soar. Litvinenko died in 2006 of radiation poisoning, after apparently drinking tea spiked with polonium-210 during a meeting with a pair of other former Russian spies. “The polonium trail literally led all the way back to Russia,” Pierce said in response to Nebenzia’s remarks.
Haley emphasized that such “weapons of terror” might soon be deployed around the world.
“If we don’t come together soon and take a firm unequivocal stance against this deadly trend, the next attack will come and it could very well come closer to home for one of us,” she said. “This is a matter of basic morality. We cannot in good conscience allow this to continue.”
