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Asia Times
August 8, 2002
Russia left to tackle chemical stockpile alone
By Sergei Blagov

MOSCOW - Russia is running short of money to destroy its huge stockpile of chemical weapons. In the absence of substantial help from the United States, it is looking to its own resources for destruction of the weapons, says Sergei Kiriyenko, former prime minister now heading the state commission on chemical disarmament.

Kiriyenko said in Moscow that the US had pledged US$180 million for 2002-2003. But no funds had yet been received, he said. Kiriyenko spoke of alternative options, but did not spell out what these were.

General Valery Kapashin, head of the federal department of safe storage and the liquidation of chemical arsenals, backed Kiriyenko's claim with the announcement that Russia would build new facilities for safe storage and destruction of these weapons. About four-fifths of this stock is nerve gases.

An estimated 44,000 tonnes of poisonous gases are stored at seven main facilities, all of them in European Russia. Under pledges given in 1997 when Russia ratified the international chemical weapons convention, it declared it would destroy those weapons by 2008. Russia is far behind schedule in the destruction program. It has asked repeatedly for international assistance in meeting its commitments, but this has not reached expected levels.

The Kremlin announced last year that Russia would use a provision in the convention allowing an additional five years for destruction of the weapons. That means Russia is now looking at destruction of the weapons only by 2012.

Russian leaders said earlier that the country would need $7 billion for the liquidation of its chemicals arsenal. It asked for international assistance for construction of seven plants for disposal of these weapons.

The government has allocated $700 million for destruction of the weapons over the next two years, says Zinoviy Pak, head of the Munitions Agency. The US has pledged $900 million towards the design and construction of the seven facilities. These facilities will include Shchuchye, the largest of these plants due to become operational by 2004. About 14 percent of Russia's arsenal is stored at Shchuchye in the Ural Mountains.

The first of the destruction facilities at Gorny in central Russia is due to become operational in August next year, says Kiriyenko. Gorny will be a testing site for new disposal technologies.

Such experimentation is making many nervous. Lev Fyodorov, head of the Union for Chemical Safety, a non-governmental organization, says the facilities under construction, including those at Shchuchye, are being built to use untested technology.

Not all chemical weapons are stored at such facilities. Hundreds of caches of chemical weapons have been stored all over the place in Russia and other former Soviet states. These could rupture and leak, posing a severe threat, environmental experts warn.

The chemical weapons convention deals with post-World War II chemical stocks. But the weapons produced between 1915 and 1946 remain unaccounted for, Fyodorov says. Many of these older stocks lie buried in old military camps, some of which have since become residential areas or national parks, he says.

There are up to 500 such forgotten dumps, Fyodorov says. Most of these are in Russia, but there are several also in Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Georgia, according to Fyodorov's investigations. Fyodorov says that up to 120,000 tonnes of chemical weapons have been "lost and forgotten" by the Russian military. That would make these stocks bigger than all known chemical weapons stocks in Russia and the US combined.

Russian officials accuse Fyodorov of exaggerating the danger from such stocks. But they concede that such stocks can cause contamination. Some experts have said that the 10-millimeter walls of many of these containers have been eroded at a rate of about a millimeter every six years. This would mean that many of these casings have been eaten through. They argue that even small leakages of many of these chemicals, particularly mustard gas, can cause cancer or dangerous mutations in the body.

Russia is struggling to find the means to destroy the stocks it knows it has. It is anybody's guess what it can do with the "forgotten" weapons. (Inter Press Service)

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