Although reports have indicated opposition to Russia’s request to extend its chemical weapons destruction deadline by five years, officials hope to at least push the deadline back in smaller increments, a Russian disarmament official said Sunday (see GSN, Sept. 24).

Members of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which oversees the Chemical Weapons Convention, are considering Russia’s proposal to extend the 2007 deadline to 2012 at a conference this week at The Hague, said Sergei Kiriyenko, chairman of the Russian state commission on chemical disarmament.

“The most likely outcome of a discussion of Russia’s proposal will be an intermediate solution,” Kiriyenko said Sunday.  “At best, the period for the program implementation will be extended stage-by-stage — at first for one year, then for another one, until the program is completed” (Roza Magasumova, ITAR-Tass, Oct. 6 in FBIS-SOV, Oct. 6).

Russia might consider withdrawing entirely from the treaty if its proposal is rejected, Gen. Nikolai Bezborodov, deputy head of the Russian state commission on chemical disarmament, said Monday (see GSN, Oct. 8; Sergei Blagov, Environment News Service, Oct. 8).

A lack of promised international aid has hindered progress on destruction activities, said Zinoviy Pak, general director of the Russian Munitions Agency and a member of the Russian delegation to the OPCW conference (see GSN, Oct. 1).

“We have never abandoned our commitments to destroy our chemical weapons arsenals,” Pak said, “but we have always said that for financial reasons we will not be able to do this on time and without help from Western countries.”

The total cost of Russia’s chemical disarmament program has been estimated at $5 billion to $6 billion, and the country has received only one-third of that amount, Pak said.  Officials plan to begin destroying 400 metric tons of chemical weapons at the Gorny disposal plant as early as April 2003, according to Izvestiya (see GSN, Aug. 22).  Six other disposal plants are still in various stages of preparation and are not ready for use (Izvestiya/BBC Monitoring, Oct. 8).

Forgotten Weapons

Meanwhile, besides Russia’s arsenal of 40,000 metric tons of chemical weapons stored at seven sites, there are also hundreds of caches of old chemical weapons buried throughout the former Soviet Union that could leak and pose risks, according to Lev Fyodorov, head of the Union for Chemical Safety.

While the treaty oversees Russia’s post-World War II chemical weapons, agents produced between 1915 and 1946 remain unaccounted for, Fyodorov said.  As many as 120,000 metric tons of chemical weapons agents might be “lost and forgotten,” he said.

If those estimates are accurate, it is more than the U.S. and Russian chemical weapons arsenals combined, according to Environmental News Service.  Russian chemical disarmament officials, however, have said that the actual number of buried chemical weapons is much smaller.  The burial sites and unexploded chemical bombs could nonetheless pose some contamination risks, the officials said (Blagov, Environment News Service).

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