Russian labs are caught making illegal chemical weapons. Will Trump finally respond?

[Nevilledog]

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John Sipher
@john_sipher
Russian labs are caught making illegal chemical weapons. Will Trump finally respond?

Opinion | Russian labs are caught making illegal chemical weapons. Will Trump finally respond?
News groups expose clandestine chemical weapons effort.
washingtonpost.com

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/russian-labs-are-caught-making-illegal-chemical-weapons-will-trump-finally-respond/2020/10/28/c1cdaa68-1885-11eb-82db-60b15c874105_story.html

IT WAS outrageous enough that a deadly nerve agent was used in an assassination attempt against Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who survived. But the story is not over. Now, a group of news outlets has exposed what they describe as clandestine Russian organizations carrying out illegal chemical weapons development concealed as civilian research.

If these reports are true, they add a major dimension of concern to the attempted killings of Mr. Navalny in August and former military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter in March 2018 in Salisbury, England. The Chemical Weapons Convention prohibits the development, production, acquisition, stockpiling, retention, transfer or use of chemical weapons. President Vladimir Putin says Russia has strictly adhered to its commitments under the treaty, but these reports suggest otherwise.

The reports are by the open-source investigations outfit Bellingcat; the Insider, a Russian news organization; Germany’s Der Spiegel; and the Russian service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. They found cellphone and text message logs that point to previously unknown involvement of two organizations and several scientists in the use of Novichok, a class of nerve agents created by the Soviet Union in the last years of the Cold War, against the Skripals. The news organizations reported that the St. Petersburg State Institute for Experimental Military Medicine of the Ministry of Defense, as well as the Scientific Center Signal, had taken the lead in weaponizing Novichok agents. Neither of these two organizations was cited in the recent European Union and British sanctions against Russia in response to the attack on Mr. Navalny.

The news organizations say the two research groups closely coordinated with a black-operations unit of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence, that carried out the poisoning attempt on the Skripals. They report that Scientific Center Signal may have helped reformulate the Novichok agents to improve the rate and speed of absorption of the poison, as well as make it easier to deliver clandestinely. The news reports reinforce a conclusion made in 2018 by Mark Sedwill, then the British national security adviser, who said after the Skripal attempt that Russia had started a program to “test means of delivering chemical warfare agents and to train personnel from special units” in their use, and that Russia subsequently investigated “ways of delivering nerve agents, including by application to door handles.”

*snip*

[50 Shades Of Blue]

1. Trump: "La la la I can't hear you!"

[Voltaire2]

2. ah well, we are not in compliance either.

Abstract
The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) is one of the most important multilateral arms control instruments; it requires its 188 parties to refrain from producing, acquiring, retaining or using chemical weapons (CW) and to destroy their existing CW stockpiles by a fixed date. The United States and Russia declared the possession of the world’s largest CW inventories and have been working assiduously to incinerate, chemically neutralize or otherwise dispose of their respective caches. Unfortunately, neither country met the treaty’s April 29, 2012 final, non-extendable deadline. The United States managed to destroy 90% of its CW stocks on time, but under current projections, it will not complete the process until 2023–more than 11 years late.

This article examines the causes of that default and analyzes its legal and policy consequences. It concludes that the United States stands in material breach of the CWC; that none of the putative legal excuses or justifications is adequate to absolve the violation; and that other parties may have recourse to remedies under the CWC, under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, or under general international law. Moreover, it concludes that the striking U.S. diplomatic success in largely finessing this issue through the CWC’s treaty implementation bodies is misguided–although it has allowed the United States to escape censure or punishment in this instance, that accomplishment deserves the true long-run U.S. interest in insisting upon the importance of strict compliance with arms control treaties and in validating the rule of international law more generally.

https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/1042/

[RainCaster]

3. Trump will praise him for being a strong leader

He worships thugs and wants to be one himself.

[lagomorph777]

4. You mean respond by issuing a purchase order?

Probably, yes.

[NCjack]

5. Good people on both sides.