Is Putin, a big Assad supplier, seriously going to disarm him?

Russia’s offer is also ironic in part because the State Department has not been able to force Russia itself to comply with the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), the international treaty that came into effect in 1997 to outlaw both the possession and transfer of chemical weapons. The latest State Department report on the treaty noted, “Based on available information, the United States cannot certify that Russia has met its obligations for declaration of its CWPFs [Chemical Weapons Production Facilities], CW development facilities, and CW stockpiles.”. This paradox was not lost on Sen. Jim Risch, a Republican from Idaho, who Tweeted on Monday night, “According to our own State Department, Russia isn’t living up to its own Chemical Weapons obligations. How can we trust them with Syria’s?”

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Paula DeSutter, who served from 2002 to 2009 as the Assistant Secretary of State for verification and compliance—a post that involved monitoring countries’ compliance with the CWC—told The Daily Beast that the problem with Russia and the CWC has been an issue going back to her first year on the job. “Our estimates on their stockpiles based on their production facility capacity gave a much higher production number than they actually declared,” she said.

To be sure, the United States has yet to destroy its own stocks of chemical weapons in compliance with the treaty. DeSutter also said she believed the Russians were in “non-compliance” with the CWC, but added that the United States never had definitive proof of Russian violations beyond intelligence estimates.

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