By Vestnik Kavkaza
Russia received an official promise from Damascus that Syria would send all the information about its arsenals to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons within a week. Russian-American agreements on chemical weapons in Syria should be implemented by the end of the first six months of 2014, Sergey Ryabkov, the deputy head of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Russia, stated.
According to the president of the PIR-Center, Vladimir Orlov, “as a result of complicated negotiations between Russia and America, a big breakthrough on the Syrian problem was reached, first of all concerning weapons of mass destruction in Syria, i.e. chemical weapons. Potentially, it means an unprecedented agreement which can be characterized as a working plan or a road map. There has been no situation in the last decades when weapons of mass destruction would be destroyed in the context of an internal political conflict, a civil war. The main vulnerability of the plan is historical memory, probably. These are questions of guaranteed non-aggression by the United States and their allies against a state which decides to destroy its chemical weapons. The agreement is as unprecedented as it is fragile.”
“Russia has no right to encourage the disarmament of Syria, if the Syrian government won’t get significant guarantees of security,” Orlov thinks. “A cheque on overthrowing Assad has been drawn already. It was made by the Sunni regimes, first of all by Saudi Arabia. The money is huge. Those who feel responsible should work off the cheque. Probably, there are such agreements between the monarchies and Israel, which bet on the isolation of Iran and the exclusion of pro-Iranian Syria from the game on the grounds of anything – chemical weapons, humanitarian aspects, human rights and so on. Kerry went from Geneva to Jerusalem, and I think there were no constructive results which could be expected from Israel as a regional power. I can’t imagine how the process of destruction of chemical weapons can be accomplished without a political resolution in Syria and the end of the civil war.”
According to the head of information projects of the PIR-Center, Andrey Baklitsky, “Syria hasn’t announced the amounts of its chemical weapons, but in general there is about a thousand tons. For instance, Russia in 2012 destroyed 4 thousand tons of chemical weapons, i.e. fourfold more than should be destroyed in Syria. If all the chemical weapons were taken to Russia, Russia would destroy it in four months, if it stopped all its own programs, which is impossible, but we have the necessary technical capacity. Russia spent 22 billion rubles on destruction of the 4 thousand tons. At the moment Russia has six chemical weapon destruction plants; a seventh is being constructed.”
Along with Russia, neighboring states could help in taking the weapons out – Jordan and Turkey where it could be stored and then transported to a third country or destroyed there. “However, neither Turkey nor Jordan is enthusiastic about getting chemical weapons from Syria. As far as I understand, Russia is not happy either. We should understand that this is a giant infrastructural project which could be very interesting, except for the problems which could prevent it.”
