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Poland and Russia in Syrian chemical weapons row

PR dla Zagranicy
Peter Gentle 05.09.2013 09:08
Russia's foreign ministry has denied allegations made by Poland's foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski that the Soviet Union helped build Syria's chemical weapons arsenal.

Didier
Didier Reynders (left) and Radosław Sikorski in Brussels: photo - PAP / EPA / OLIVIER HOSLET

“Unfortunately, many countries contributed to the construction of chemical weapons in Syria, but as [US intelligence] reports show, the Soviet Union was one of them,” Foreign Minister Sikorski said at a press conference on Wednesday after a meeting with his Belgian counterpart Didier Reynders.

Minister Sikorski has called on Russia to become more involved in solving the crisis in Syria, and not block UN Security resolutions, after the suspected chemical weapons attack near Damascus.

But the Russian foreign ministry has released a statement saying that the West is to blame for Syria's chemical weapons arsenal, not the Soviet Union.

“At the root of its creation in the 70s and 80s, the chemical industry that formed in the Syrian Republic was not Soviet, but rather [based on] Western technologies and supply of chemicals,” the statement by the Russian foreign ministry says.

The Polish foreign minister, however, has tweeted links to three publications, including a declassified CIA report from 1983, on the spread of Soviet chemical weapons during the Cold War era.

The report claimed that the Soviet Union supplied Syria with materials for the production of chemical warfare agents and also provided specialized training for their use.

Another report, this time in the The Middle East Quarterly (No. 3/2002), claims that the Soviet Union, and then Russia, were considered to be the main supplier of technology that allowed Syria to build an arsenal of chemical weapons.

Minister Sikorski has said that if Russia is partly to blame for supplying chemical weapons to Syria then it should not block a UN Security Resolution on the issue.

Relations between the US and Russia became more heated on Wednesday, however, when President Putin accused secretary of state John Kerry of being a liar.

On a statement where Kerry told a Congressional hearing on Syria that al-Qaeda was not helping Syrian rebels fight the Assad regime in Damascus, Putin said: "This was very unpleasant and surprising for me. We talk to them (the Americans) and we assume they are decent people, but he is lying and he knows that he is lying. This is sad." (pg)

tags: Syria
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