MOSCOW, January 17. /TASS/. Washington has displayed its unwillingness to speak openly about biological warfare issues with other nations, and seeks to impose its desired decisions through under-the-radar negotiations that lack transparency, Acting Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said during his Friday press conference on the results of Russian diplomacy in 2019.
According to the Acting Foreign Minister, the Technical Secretariat of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) was unlawfully granted punitive powers in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
"A vaguely similar approach is now being attempted with the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, which we, together with the majority of nations, have long ago suggested as a groundwork for a verification mechanism," Lavrov specified.
"The Americans basically unilaterally block this solution and seek to promote their own interests through secretariats of various international organizations, including the UN Secretariat, through their non-transparent, murky, back-door bilateral contacts that push their agendas," he said, pointing to the fact that the US "sets up biological laboratories on post-Soviet territories."
"These all are very serious issues and, once again, they worry everyone," Lavrov emphasized. "But, once again, the Americans do not want to discuss them fairly, involving all parties to the biological weapons ban."
According to the top diplomat, the United States seeks to take international security issues into its own hands, prohibiting any inclusive dialogue that could enable a consensus. He added that Washington uses a similar ploy for its trade and economic policy, as they try to inhibit the emergence of new world powers.
"We see how tense the trade dialogue between the US and China is. In general, the [World Trade Organization] has a body dedicated to settling trade disputes, but it has been dysfunctional for more than a year already, because the US blocks appointments to this body and it cannot reach quorum," Lavrov noted.
"Instead of solving world trade issues through a universally agreed upon international legal mechanism, the US prefers to deal with its competition one on one," he continued. "As a matter of fact, I read this morning that the European Commission expressed its concerns on whether US-Chinese trade agreement violates the principles of the free trade, and the WTO norms. The Commission reserved the right to return to this issue later."