Kremlin says Russia not working on chemical weapons

MOSCOW, October 7. /TASS/. Russia is not carrying out any work on developing or upgrading any chemical weapons, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday. The Russian presidential spokesman thus commented on speculations that opposition figure Alexey Navalny had allegedly been poisoned with an upgraded Novichok chemical agent. "It [the work] cannot be carried out owing to the fact that Russia is a member of the corresponding Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons," the Kremlin spokesman stressed. "Russia has honored all its commitments under this Convention and, therefore, there can be no talk about that," Peskov said. The Kremlin spokesman also said that the statements by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) needed to be studied on the basis of "professional information" instead of "general assertions." On Tuesday, the OPCW reported that it had submitted to Germany a report relating to the poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny. The report notes that the test results "confirm that the biomarkers of the cholinesterase inhibitor found in Mr Navalny’s blood and urine samples have similar structural characteristics to the toxic chemicals belonging to schedules 1.A.14 and 1.A.15 that were added to the Annex on Chemicals to the Convention during the Twenty-Fourth Session of the Conference of the States Parties in November 2019 (also called Novichoks in the West - TASS). This cholinesterase inhibitor is not listed in the Annex on Chemicals to the Convention." Russian blogger Alexey Navalny was rushed to a local hospital in the Siberian city of Omsk on August 20 after collapsing on a Moscow-bound flight from Tomsk. He fell into a coma and was put on a ventilator in an intensive care unit. On August 22, he was airlifted to Berlin and admitted to the Charite hospital. He woke up from the coma on September 7 and was discharged on September 22. On September 2, Berlin claimed that having examined Navalny’s test samples, German government toxicologists had come to the conclusion that the blogger had been affected by a toxic agent belonging to the Novichok family. Kremlin Spokesman Peskov stated on many occasions that Russia was ready for comprehensive cooperation with Germany. He pointed out that no poisonous substances had been detected in Navalny’s system prior to his transfer to Berlin. Read more