MOSCOW, March 21. /TASS/. Russia urged member states of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to pay serious attention to the information on Ukrainian Neo-Nazis plotting a provocation with chemical weapons in Kramatorsk, Russia’s Permanent Representative at the OPCW and Ambassador to the Netherlands Alexander Shulgin told an online briefing on Tuesday.
"Much attention [at the OPCW Executive Council’s session] was paid to the issue of the threat of a chemical provocation in Ukraine. We fully used the materials of the briefing by Chief of the [Russian] Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Troops Igor Kirillov and reported about Ukrainian nationalists’ preparations for chemical provocations at the factory in the area of the city of Kramatorsk on Ukrainian territory," the envoy said.
The report pointed to "hazardous chemicals and actually the US Army’s service weapons BZ of psychotropic effect," Shulgin said.
"We called on the member states to pay serious attention to this information and make relevant conclusions," he said.
The Americans together with their allies denied all these facts and "tried to present the situation in a way that allegedly Russia was on the point of using chemical weapons," the envoy pointed out.
The Russian side responded by rejecting all these accusations, he said. "We cited facts to show that the Americans can hardly teach us how to treat the chemical convention. We gave a long list of wrongdoings by the Americans who themselves breach the chemical convention," Shulgin stressed, recalling that the United States had "secretly destroyed chemical munitions from the arsenals of Saddam Hussein in Iraq" and citing other facts.