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Russia, a founder of a chemical arms watchdog, is in its cross hairs

LONDON — Last fall, President Vladimir Putin summoned a Kremlin television crew to his residence for a ceremony marking the destruction of Russia’s last declared stocks of chemical weapons.

Putin spoke proudly of Russia’s status as a peacemaker and derided the United States for lagging behind. An official from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the global body that monitors agreements to whittle down stockpiles, stood by, beaming.

Just six months later, Russia has been accused of secretly producing a strain of lethal nerve agents for years, in what would be a grave violation of its international commitments.

A team of inspectors from the global watchdog organization — the same agency that celebrated with Putin last September — this week joined the investigation into the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy, and his daughter Yulia, who were found unresponsive in the English city of Salisbury on March 4.

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Britain has accused Russia of exposing Skripal to Novichok, a top-secret, military-grade nerve agent developed in the last years of the Soviet Union. On Sunday, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson sharply escalated the case against Russia, saying Britain had proof that Russia had been stockpiling Novichok nerve agents and researching their use in assassinations.

Russia has denied the charge.

If proven true, it will cast doubt on the work of the monitoring body, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013 for making chemical weapons “taboo under international law.”

“This is a real shock to the system,” as members question Russia’s reporting of its own stocks, said Paul F. Walker, director of environmental sustainability at Green Cross International, a disarmament advocacy group.

“Nobody that I know of has questioned their veracity about declaring everything,” Walker said. “Now, with the Novichok situation, it is a new day at the OPCW. People will ask, is this inspection system intrusive enough? In the executive council in particular, people are raising questions about secret stockpiles.”

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Walker said that he was surprised by Britain’s claim it had proof Russia had been producing and stockpiling the nerve agent and that he had not yet seen evidence to back it up.

“They must have something we haven’t seen,” he said. “That has to come out.”

Russia has pushed back hard against the accusation, comparing it to the U.S. case, later discredited, that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling chemical weapons. Moscow has suggested that the nerve agent used on the Skripals could have been produced in Britain, Sweden, Slovakia, the Czech Republic or the United States.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova and Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov have each said that no Novichok program existed in either Russia or the Soviet Union.

But scientists have come forward to describe it. Leonid Rink, who worked at a Soviet chemical weapons laboratory, told the Ria Novosti news service that “a big group of specialists” had worked on the strains and that it would be “zero problem” for laboratories outside Russia to produce the nerve agent.

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Vladimir Uglev, who worked in the same laboratory as Rink, told The Bell news website that he helped produce four agents under the code name Foliant from 1972 until 1988. He said he believed that, by analyzing the remains of chemical agents in the blood, it would be possible to determine “where the specific dose was produced and by whom.”

He added that, based on what he witnessed at that time, the victims were not likely to survive.

“I can say with nearly 100 percent certainty that if Skripal and his daughter are taken off life support, they will die,” Uglev said. “They are now only technically alive.”

British authorities have been tight-lipped about the investigation but in recent days intensified their focus on vehicles that the Skripals traveled in, where the agent, in powder form, could have been planted on a door handle or in a ventilation system. In an interview with RIA Novosti, Rink, the Russian scientist, scoffed at the theory that Novichok could have been planted in Yulia Skripal’s suitcase, saying that it was so lethal that, as he put it, “she would not have reached London.”

At present, inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons have a limited task: to take samples of the agent used in the attack and send them to independent laboratories to determine whether it is Novichok.

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If the dispute escalates, however, Britain could request a so-called challenge inspection of Russian laboratories to look for signs of Novichok production — a measure that has never been invoked in the monitoring group’s 21-year history. Russia, in turn, could request its own challenge inspections.

Challenge inspections are designed to be intensive and carried out at short notice; inspectors are to be allowed access to a laboratory within 36 hours of arrival.

The Chemical Weapons Convention was designed to eliminate large stocks of chemical weapons that could be used on the battlefield. Russia committed to destroying 40,000 metric tons, and the United States to 31,500 metric tons. Russia announced last year that it had completed this task. The United States has eliminated seven of nine stockpiles, holding about 90 percent of its agents.

Novichok, then an early-stage project, was not included on a list of banned chemicals compiled in 1987, so Russia was under no obligation to regularly report on its stockpiles and their destruction. But producing Novichok would be a serious violation, because the treaty broadly prohibits the development and use of chemical weapons, said Richard Guthrie, an independent chemical weapons expert and editor of CBW Events.

Johnson on Sunday said that Britain had evidence that Russia stockpiled Novichok during the past decade and investigated ways to deliver nerve agents for assassination. A Foreign Office spokesman declined to describe the evidence, saying only that “clearly, the information the foreign secretary was referring to is very sensitive.”

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Experts said that Britain could have learned of a secret program in various ways: communications intercepts, moles within laboratories, publications by Russian chemists reporting their synthesis of rare compounds, or a computer virus lurking within Western equipment sold for use in Russian laboratories.

Guthrie said that concerns about a Novichok program had surfaced occasionally but that Britain had probably chosen not to raise the issue publicly with the weapons-monitoring organization for fear of derailing trade deals or other agreements with Russia.

“If your information isn’t perfect, you might think, ‘We’ll leave this allegation, maybe these aren’t so serious,'” Guthrie said. “They didn’t feel it was important enough, and I think Novichoks would have stayed on the back burner if they hadn’t been used in Salisbury.”

This would not be the first time the chemical weapons watchdog was shaken by great-power politics. In 2002, its director-general, José Bustani, was ousted amid divisions over whether Iraq maintained stockpiles of chemical weapons. Bustani, in an interview, said the United States pushed for his removal because he had persuaded Saddam to accede to the convention, which he said would have undermined the U.S. case for invading Iraq.

More recently, Russia has used its veto power in the U.N. Security Council repeatedly to block action against its ally, Syria, based on the monitoring group’s reporting on chemical weapons use there. Andrew C. Weber, a former assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs, said this has tarnished Russia’s “extraordinary achievement” in destroying 40,000 metric tons of stockpiled weapons.

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“It does take away from their achievement — frankly, it’s disgraceful — and now the Russian Federation has apparently been caught in a flagrant violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention,” said Weber, who emerged Tuesday from a routine meeting with Russian chemical weapons experts on disarmament projects. They were “embarrassed,” he said, when Novichok came up in conversation.

“They don’t want to believe that their government actually did this,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

ELLEN BARRY © 2018 The New York Times

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