OPCW

If during the first three weeks of the Skripal crisis it was the British who made the running, over the last two weeks the initiative has slowly shifted to the Russians.
As is often the way, the Russians – caught by surprise by a crisis that seemed to come out of nowhere – initially responded reactively.
However as the weeks have passed they have gradually found their footing, and are now starting to score points.

On the eve of the meeting of the OPCW’s executive council – convened by Russia and scheduled for tomorrow – we have had a highly revealing succession of statements about the Skripal case from the British authorities.

Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned by a nerve agent on March 4 on a park bench in Salisbury, England.
Skripal had been a Russian double agent, a spy who turned over 300 names of Russian spies to British intelligence from 1995 to 2004. He was (not so surprisingly) arrested in Russia in 2004 and sentenced to thirteen years in prison. He was released in a spy-swap in 2010, settled in the UK and became a British citizen.

In a recent article for The Duran I said that the EU Council on Thursday would issue a statement which appeared to give full-throated support to Britain’s position in the Skripal case, but which on close study would not do so.

CONSPIRACY THEORIST? Even British Prime Minster Theresa May cannot get her story straight.

RT | March 13, 2018 Moscow will not respond to the British request about a clandestine Soviet chemical weapon allegedly used in an ex-double agent’s poisoning until a sample of the agent is provided, the Russian foreign minister said. On Monday, British Prime Minister Theresa May said a chemical weapon developed under a secret Soviet […]

The UN OPCW Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) report regarding Khan Sheikhoun has sharply divided opinion, largely because the US and some of its closest allies choose to maintain its central finding of “confidence” the Syrian Arab Republic was guilty is a finding of indisputable fact, whilst Russia (with the open or tacit support of others) […]

Analysis — The events at the United Nations Security Council surrounding the joint OPCW-UN-JIM investigation  report (“the report”) into the alleged Khan Sheikhoun chemical weapon attack are not being widely reported.
This is unfortunate because they show that international opinion is swinging heavily against the report, which has lost credibility.
Here an account of what happened on the two most recent occasions when the UN Security Council discussed this issue is necessary.

Prof. Marcello Ferrada de Noli
The Indicter

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