RUSSIAN FEDERATION STATEMENT BY THE PERMANENT REPRESENTATIVE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION TO THE OPCW 28 APRIL 2018 A Joint Statement (dated 26 April 2018) by the UK, France and the US and a group of their usual followers has been posted on the French Foreign ministry official website. In the spirit of unbridled confrontation with the Russian Federation and further politicization of the OPCW the States – signatories to this document made an attempt to alter the meaning of the joint Russia-Syria briefing that took place at the OPCW Headquarters on April 26. This is an attempt with inappropriate means. We cannot help but note that in their desire to defend what cannot be defended at all, i.e. the aggression against a sovereign state under falsified pretext, the above mentioned countries do not hesitate to openly manipulate well established facts. Despite the assertions to the effect that Syria and Russia “have continued to create obstacles to delay the OPCW investigators deployment to Douma”, Syria and Russia seized as early as April 10 the Technical Secretariat with the request to send without any delay a group of OPCW experts to investigate the incident. The delay in the arrival of the OPCW team in Douma is entirely to blame on the US, France and the UK. Notwithstanding the press-release issued by the OPCW on April 10 about the scheduled arrival of the OPCW investigators to Damascus on April 14, the trio of the Western aggressors carried out in a perfidious way a missile strike on the Syrian Arab Republic, which occurred just a few hours before the planned coming of the OPCW experts to Damascus. Thus it has been proven beyond any doubt that France, the US and the UK do not care at all about the OPCW, as they show their total disregard for the Technical Secretariat and the Director-General Ahmet Üzümcü personally. In light of what has been above-stated, it becomes obvious that the war against the OPCW, real rather propagandistic, is being waged not by Russia, as slanderously indicated in the statement, but precisely by France, the UK and the US. The Western trio wrongly ascribed to the Director-General a statement in which he allegedly warned Russia that such a meeting with “witnesses” claiming to have been hired to simulate a 1 English version – unofficial translation. EC-M-58/NAT.10 page 2 chemical weapons attack runs against the work currently being carried out in Syria by the OPCW investigators. As a matter of the fact, the Director-General only suggested in his letter (April 23) to the Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the OPCW that “the proposed briefing should be held at a later time after the work of the FFM on these allegations is completed”. The language about the Technical Secretariat “advising the Russian delegation that these persons (meaning the Syrians coming to The Hague) should be first interviewed by the FFM”, emerged only in the OPCW press-release issued on April 25. Clearly this was made under the pressure of the same countries, although by that moment the Technical Secretariat should already have known that 6 out of 17 Syrians invited to The Hague had been duly interviewed by the FFM (they asked to meet just these 6 persons while the others were of no interest to them at all). No criticism is strong enough to unmask the baseless allegations by the signatories of the Statement to the effect that the authenticity of the information gathered to date on the chemical attacks that occurred in Duma on April 7, is unassailable. As a matter of fact nobody, let alone 500 persons, has been found in Duma with symptoms of exposure to toxic chemicals. The references made in the Statement to the World Health Organization are inappropriate since the WHO Director General T.Adhan did not admit so much as “suspicions” of the use of chemical weapons, based on the information provided by the cluster of some local self-organized medical bodies. The hypocrisy is quite flagrant as the Western trio call on Russia to “fully cooperate with the OPCW”. This is a testimony to one obvious fact - the troubled trio, i.e. the US, France and the UK (they were caught red handed and convicted of open lies) are reluctant to acknowledge their wrong-doing which is detrimental to the international law and conducive to further discrediting the OPCW and the Director-General of the Technical Secretariat personally. Hence, the ostrich policy of the UK, France and the US. No representative of these countries dared to attend our briefing – they just hid their heads into the sand. However they will be unable make people forget their misdeeds behind the smoke screen of disinformation and defamation. Indeed, the growing number of States-Parties to the CWC, including the Executive Council members, cannot but draw the conclusion about the “indecent behavior” of the US, UK and France, not willing to acknowledge their fault and stubbornly pursuing the destructive policy the only consequence of which is to further delay the political settlement of the Syrian crisis as requested by the UN Security Council Resolution 2564.