An attempt by international investigators to assess blame for the use of chemical weapons in Syria is “not legitimate,” a senior Russian diplomat said Thursday.
“Of course, we do not consider the work of the so-called attributive mechanism to be legitimate,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said.
That’s a defiant tone following Russia’s defeat in a vote at the Organization for the Prohibition of the Chemical Weapons on Wednesday. Western powers pushed successfully to allow the OPCW, which investigates whether chemical weapons have been used in battle, to draw conclusions about who used the toxins. The resolution making the change cleared the two-thirds threshold for passage, even though Russia and its allies opposed the measure.
“The consequences will be really dire,” Ryabkov added, per TASS, a state-run outlet. “The prospects and the future of the [Chemical Weapons Convention] itself are becoming rather vague as a result.”
The question of whether an international body could assess blame for the use of chemical weapons was hotly contested at the United Nations Security Council. The United States and other western allies supported the findings of a UN-OPCW Joint Investigative Mechanism, which was established as part of the deal in which Russia agreed to dispose of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s chemical weapons.
Russia, which supports Assad, protested the JIM was too politicized to make reliable judgments about the cases. And Ryabkov returned to that theme on Thursday.
“We doubt the possibility of preserving the CWC and the OPCW in their present form, which has existed to date,” he said. “However, a lot depends here on the practical behavior of the aforementioned group of countries (the US, the UK and France) and the top officials of the OPCW Technical Secretariat, which also took a cue from our opponents.”
The United Kingdom celebrated the vote, however. British authorities have had a heightened interest in chemical weapons controversies in recent months, since Prime Minister Theresa May blamed Russia for using “a military-grade nerve agent” to poison a former Russian military intelligence officer who lived in England after a career as a double-agent.
“The UK has led the diplomatic efforts to secure this action,” British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said Wednesday. “We look forward to working with all countries who are members of the Chemical Weapons Convention to implement the decisions taken today, and we will continue to push back on any efforts to undermine the ban on these vile weapons.”
