Sergey Lavrov, Minister of Foreign Affairs: "There is an increase in unsupported "highly likely" rhetoric in connection with the Salisbury case. At the same time, Britain keeps ignoring our propositions to conduct a joint investigation despite the fact that the Chemical Weapons Convention, the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, the 1965 Bilateral Consular Convention, and the 1959 European Convention on Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters oblige it to do otherwise. Our conclusion: If they don't want to cooperate, it means that they have something to hide. Once again, we urge London to engage in constructive dialogue in order to discover the truth. The way the events are unfolding gives us reason to believe that we are to expect anything today including a biological-weapon provocation.
Taking into account the aforementioned attempts to manipulate the status of the CWC, I want to warn Britain against using the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention the same way. I remind you that in accordance with the Convention the right to initiate and conduct an investigation is exclusive to the Security Council. There aren't, nor can there be any substitutes. I remind you that we've repeatedly proposed that all parties of the BTWC agree on the observance verification mechanism. However, the US harshly blocked our proposition and ultimately buried it. Such desire to retain discretion is usually expressed when the BTWC-regime is brought to the test due to the upscaling of military biomedical activities in the post-Soviet space in particular. We urge you to reverse the militarization of healthcare. Russia has repeatedly proposed to strengthen the BTWC. For this purpose, we've implemented various initiatives including the creation of mobile epidemic control units that can quickly respond to emergency situations of biological nature.
Esteemed ladies and gentlemen, Mr. President, the dialogue between Russia and the USA as the two largest nuclear powers is particularly important for the WMD-nonproliferation regime. Our two states created the framework of multilateral cooperation in order to prevent non-state actors from acquiring weapons of mass destruction and fight nuclear terrorism. We still believe that our cooperation is fundamentally important not only for Moscow and Washington but the whole world community. We urge you not to sacrifice that cooperation for the sake of momentary setups and short-term scenarios.
Russia is always open to fair cooperation based on the UN Charter with the five nuclear powers and all other countries in order to reinforce global strategic stability. We hope that the first step in that direction will be today's meeting the UN Security Council — the key body for the maintenance of the global peace and security. In this regard, we consider the initiative of President Trump to summon this meeting to be timely indeed.
Thank you for your attention".
