The United States obstructs Russia’s work in the United Nations by selectively issuing visas to Russian nationals, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Monday.
Russia’s chemical weapons expert Dmitry Poklonsky was denied a U.S. visa to attend a UN Security Council session last Thursday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a press statement. He was due to brief the council on Russia’s account of a suspected poison gas attack in Syria.
“The U.S. is honoring its commitments as the location of the UN headquarters in New York in bad faith and even uses them for its own selfish foreign policy objectives,” the Foreign Ministry said.
Inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said last month a “toxic chemical” containing chlorine was used in an April 2018 attack in the town of Douma, near the capital of Damascus. Syria rejected the finding and Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Monday blamed the U.S. for seeking to “prevent the spread of objective information about the Douma incident from the UN rostrum.”
The Poklonsky episode follows a similar visa denial to the head of the Russian delegation at a UN disarmament commission in March, the Foreign Ministry added.