Russia has completed the destruction of 400 tons of mustard gas, a Russian official said Saturday (see GSN, April 23).

“We have nothing to hide,” said Sergei Kiriyenko, head of the commission for disposing chemical weapons in Russia’s Volga region.

Officials in Volga are scheduled to destroy 1,200 tons of chemical weapons by 2005.

“With the amount destroyed thus far, one could have annihilated a medium-sized European city,” Kiriyenko said (Deutsche Presse-Agentur/Pakistan Dawn, April 27).

The destruction meets an international deadline to destroy 1 percent of the Russian chemical weapons stockpile by the end of April, he added.

Kiriyenko, who is also President Vladimir Putin’s representative in the Volga district, said the destruction “shows that our country is firmly fulfilling its obligations and testifies to the fact that Russian scientists can create technology not just on the world standard, but surpassing it” (Associated Press/Moscow Times, April 28).

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