MOSCOW, 30 November 2021, (TON): Russia is seriously concerned about the development of events on the site of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

This was stated by the deputy head of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, Oleg Ryazantsev, who is the head of the Russian delegation at the 26th session of the Conference of the Org-anization’s member states, which opened.

“Centrifugal tendencies are growing, the practice of making decisions by consensus has been lost, the atmosphere is utterly politicized,” stated Ryazantsev, whose text of his speech was circulated on the OPCW website.

He called the primary reason for the emerging situation “the desire of a small group of states to replace international law with their own invented rules.”

In this context, he recalled that in 2018 the OPCW’s technical secretariat was empowered with prosecutorial functions to identify those responsible for the use of chemical weapons and create an illegitimate Investigation and Identification Group, which in its reports accused Syria of using chemical weapons.

The deputy head of the Ministry of Industry and Trade said “our organization is undermined by the campaign orchestrated by a small group of countries in connection with the case of the alleged poisoning of [Alexei] Navalny in August 2020.”