Zakharova Demonstrates That Britain Is Running Dirty Operations Abroad, not Russia

FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

Zakharova Demonstrates That Britain Is Running Dirty Operations Abroad, not Russia

May 21, 2018 (EIRNS)—The Russian Foreign Ministry has provided sufficient information to prove that it is the United Kingdom, not Russia, which tends to conduct dirty operations abroad, Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told the Rossiya 1 broadcaster on May 20.

“From the very beginning, we said that all three of the arguments put forward by the United Kingdom [about the poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury] ... are groundless. The first one is that Russia has always done that, historically, and that it is in our culture to murder people abroad, carry out such operations. It seems that we have given enough historical material on this subject, moreover, the material proves that the U.K. intelligence services have always been the most involved in such operations, and, moreover, they have always been perfect in attempts—often successful ones—to portray their crimes as someone else’s,”

Zakharova said.

Another U.K. argument, according to the spokeswoman, was that the Novichok chemical weapon allegedly used in Salisbury, which from London’s point of view is the same agent as A234, was produced and tested only in Russia.

“We ... provided information that at least 20 countries of the North Atlantic region were nowadays developing [‘Novichok’-class agents] including Sweden and the Czech Republic. Three to four weeks later, our information was confirmed—what a scandal erupted in Prague, [when it turned out that] the official agencies of the Czech Republic possessed this substance,”

Zakharova said. She pointed out that the scandal around development of the Novichok-class chemical in the Czech Republic proved that the United Kingdom and the United States—which immediately supported London—were providing false information on the issue.

“The third argument, on which the U.K. position is based, that these substances were delivered from Russia, was in fact refuted by U.K. labs,” Zakharova said, and stressing that the Russian Foreign Ministry’s goal was to respond to all the false accusations with a point of view based on facts.