OPCW's Arguments Against Cooperation With Moscow on Navalny Unconvincing - Russian Envoy

PARIS (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 23rd April, 2021) References of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to the unprecedented nature of Russia's proposal to send the organization's experts to the country to assist in the investigation of the incident with Alexey Navalny are unconvincing, Russia's Permanent Representative to the OPCW Alexander Shulgin told Sputnik.

In early October 2020, Russia asked the OPCW to send experts to study the biological samples taken from Navalny in a laboratory in St. Petersburg. Initially, OPCW Director-General Fernando Arias expressed his readiness to send a group, but later rejected the proposal of the Russian side, since, according to him, there were no precedents for joint analysis in OPCW practice, and such work was always carried out by the organization independently and independently.

"In sending the request, Russia proceeded from the fact that the requesting party itself determines what kind of assistance it expects from the experts of the organization. For us, the main question was to find out where, when and under what circumstances, a chemical substance, which was discovered outside Russia, appeared in biological samples of a Russian citizen," Shulgin said, explaining the reasons for the failed visit of the organization's experts to Russia.

He recalled that in this regard, Moscow proposed that OPCW experts, together with Russian specialists, conduct joint research on the blogger's biomaterials remaining in Russia at the OPCW-certified laboratory of the Research Institute of Hygiene, Occupational Pathology and Human Ecology of Russia's FMBA in St. Petersburg. However, according to the permanent representative, the OPCW rejected this demand.

"They say that the provision of technical assistance to other countries, Germany and the UK, did not suggest such an option. We considered the references to the unprecedentedness of our proposal on modalities of technical assistance unconvincing, since the secretariat under the leadership of Arias easily took part in the establishment of illegitimate attributive structures created in violation of the chemical convention and to the detriment of the exclusive prerogatives of the UN Security Council. At the same time, no one in the technical secretariat cared that there had never been such precedents in the organization. In fact, they were fulfilling the political order of the Euro-Atlantic community," the diplomat said.