Russia will present a report on chemical weapons destruction and conversion of chemical enterprises at the 38th session of the Executive Council of the Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), opened in the Hague on Monday [11 October], Viktor Kholstov, deputy chief of the Federal Agency for Industry, has told Interfax-Military News Agency.
"We will inform the OPCW executive council of the destruction of chemical weapons stockpiles and of the construction of detoxification plants in compliance with the terms set up for Russia by the conference of the OPCW last year," he said. He added that Russia reached the first intermediate objective in 2003, when it destroyed 400 t of poison agents in time frames specified. The next stage is to be over 29 April 2007, with another 8,000 t of such agents destroyed. "We are going to ensure this by destroying the stockpiles at a site in Gornyy and by putting into operation the Kambarka plant in Udmurtia in 2005 and the Maradykovskiy plant in Kirov Region in 2006," he said.
He added that the OPCW decisions provide for the conversion of 16 out of 24 chemical weapons facilities, while the remaining eight are to be destroyed. "Six of these have been destroyed, and the other two will have been terminated by 29 April 2007. We are going to have our amendments to the conversion at two chemical facilities in Volgograd adopted at the forthcoming session," he said. According to him, this session of the executive committee is preceding the OPCW conference scheduled for December. Therefore, a variety of issues pertaining to the Chemical Weapons Convention implementation and the OPCW 2005 budget will be discussed. The session will end on Friday.

Source: Interfax-AVN military news agency web site, Moscow
BBC Monitoring