The US is continuing to block all efforts to create a verification mechanism for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, which came into force in 1975, while creating its own mechanism for biowarfare security, the Russian FM said.

The convention, which was ratified decades ago, still lacks a formal verification regime to monitor the compliance of signatories. According to Sergey Lavrov, the US contributed to this flaw in the key non-proliferation document out of self-interest.

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“I hope our American colleagues realize that it is their responsibility to find a way out of this dead end,” he said. “So far, unfortunately, they have been preserving this dead end and, in the meantime, tried to create a system of US-controlled biowarfare security, which can be manipulated, through imposing bilateral agreements with various nations that are not covered by the scope of the Convention,” added Lavrov.

The Russian foreign minister was speaking at a session of the UN Conference on Disarmament in Geneva on Wednesday.

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