Russia has repeatedly stated that the events in the Syrian city of Douma, where chemical weapons were allegedly used, are no more than a provocation, and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons shares these allegations.
This was announced on Friday, July 12, at a briefing by the Deputy Chief of the Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defense Forces of the Russian Armed Forces Sergei Kikot.
“The official results of the investigation carried out by the CMAF [the OPCW chemical weapons detection mission in Syria] were presented in a summary report published on March 1, 2018. The report states that a toxic chemical was used as a weapon in Douma, he noted. “At the same time, the materials of the report and the conclusions reached by the mission actually lead to the idea that the cylinders were dropped from the aircraft. The Russian Federation has repeatedly stated, including at this site, that it was a carefully planned and carried out provocation.”
He stressed that Russian experts presented evidence that “the characteristics, the appearance of the cylinders and the scene of the events where these incidents occurred indicate that the cylinders were placed in their places of detection manually, and not dropped from the aircraft.”
At the same time, he noted that the OPCW documented the arguments of the Russian side in a report published on February 27, 2018. According to the document, the deformations that allegedly appeared as a result of a cylinder falling, do not correspond to real ones, since “the expected heights were too great to reproduce the observed effect.”