MOSCOW, March 25. /TASS/. Western countries are disrupting the work of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in determining whether chemical weapons were used in Syria, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Monday.
"Summarizing the results of an OPCW Executive Council regular meeting held March 12-15 in The Hague, we regret to acknowledge that the Western representatives once again assumed a destructive position regarding anything that could, one way or another, clarify the details of the Syrian chemical dossier that they had manufactured in the first place," the Foreign Ministry stressed.
Russian diplomats also recalled that Western representatives blocked a proposal that Russia and some other countries had introduced to hold a briefing with every single OPCW Fact-Finding Mission in Syria expert taking part in the probe of the alleged use of chemical weapons in the Syrian city of Douma in April 2018. This investigation has been dragging on for almost a year now. The events in Douma were used by the US, UK and France as a pretext for missile strikes on Syrian research facilities in violation of the UN Charter and universally recognized international law.
According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, such a briefing could expose serious inconsistencies "in the inherently anti-Syrian findings that can be found in the report by the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission in Syria on this chemical weapons incident published on March 1. This event was yet another staged provocation by the notorious White Helmets (NGO - TASS). Russian military specialists visited Douma in the ensuing few days and scrupulously studied all the evidence and facts of this incident and it has nothing to do with Syrian aviation, the Foreign Ministry reiterated.
"Certain independent Western experts, as well as some of the experts from the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission in Syria, whose findings are not even mentioned in the final report, made the same judgement that the Douma incident was staged," the ministry stressed. "It might be the reason behind blatant resistance to the Russian initiative to hold a briefing which would uncover the truth about yet another manoeuver with the Syrian chemical dossier having the sole purpose of removing the legitimately elected Syrian government from power."
In this regard, Moscow expressed its concerns over the fact that these actions by the West have become regular and occur with the tacit agreement of the OPCW Technical Secretariat that "must be unaware that this exclusively technical and once very authoritative international structure has transformed into a geopolitical tool to advance the interests of a small group of countries in the Middle East and other regions of the world."