MOSCOW, September 13. /TASS/. Russia will insist on continuing to address the issue of Washington's military biological activities outside America’s national borders, particularly in Ukraine, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said at a briefing Tuesday.
"We will insist that our colleagues who oppose us would not draw a line under this," he said, "There are many questions here, and frankly speaking, the situation is ambiguous in terms of the weakness of the procedure, opportunities for some artificial blocking by opponents. We all understand this, but water wears away stone, and in the world, I emphasize, the attitude to what military-biological activity is and what interaction with Western countries is in this sphere is growing."
The deputy foreign minister drew attention to the fact that "people in many parts of the world are now trying to think about what can be the consequences of such a perfectly complacent and such, so to speak, forgetful attitude to this subject, when we are talking about very serious issues often with the direct participation of the American military department and its contractors." "We all know how skillfully the US uses so-called outsourcing," he added.
"All of this combined is dangerous, and in some respects a threat. We will continue to talk about this openly," he vowed.
When referring to US military-biological activities in Ukraine, Ryabkov stated that the problem lies primarily in the "lack of transparency of what is happening". "We emphasized long before the special military operation that there are no mechanisms, no tools that would allow us to independently judge for what purposes this relevant work is ultimately carried out," he explained, "But what we've been able to gather from the operation has reinforced our position that here there’s a direct violation of the requirements of the [Biological and Toxin Weapons] Convention. I stress that without those materials, we would not be on the path that we are now halfway or even a third of the way through: there is still work to be done on Article 6 [of the convention]."