MOSCOW, May 28. /TASS/. The collective West is seeking to discredit Russia and strip it of the right to vote within the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Chief of Russia’s Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Troops Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov said.

"The collective West is acting according to a pre-planned scheme to discredit, with the ultimate goal of depriving Russia of the right to vote within the organization, as well as to be elected to its executive bodies, as it was done in respect of Syria," he told a briefing.

He recalled that ahead of a regular session of the OPCW Executive Council, Russia had been expelled from it while Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania were brought in. "We can only imagine how it will be held with Russia being stripped of the right to vote and amid the aggressive campaign laden with false accusations unleashed against Russia by Romania, Estonia, Germany, and other EU countries during the previous session," Kirillov stressed.

According to the General, the OPCW's probes into the chemical incidents in Syria in 2018, when the charges were based only on evidence from the Western-sponsored White Helmets, "demonstrates that similar probes will never be transparent and unbiased." He recalled verified data on Ukraine’s use of toxic agents (such as Tabun, BZ, or hydrogen cyanide) and non-lethal chemical agents (CS, chloropicrin, chloracetophenone) as further evidence of the organization’s double standards. "The entire evidentiary base was shared with the Technical Secretariat, but we have received no substantive response from it," he noted.

Apart from that, in his words, the OPCW sponsored several training courses on investigating chemical incidents especially for Ukraine. Special exercises to drill these skills of handling toxic agents and sample collecting for Ukrainian military in Slovakia. "This is yet another proof that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is controlled by the West and used by it to square political accounts," he added.