Russia has offered to send troops to Syria to guard sites where chemical weapons are to be destroyed, under a disarmament plan expected to be announced in the next few days.

Sergei Ryabkov, a deputy foreign minister, said that other former Soviet republics which were part of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation would also deploy soldiers to provide security for an international team of weapons inspectors who would oversee the task of destroying Syria's stockpile of poison gases and nerve agents.

The alliance includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

Ryabkov said that Moscow would not allow the Syrian arsenal to be transferred to Russia for dismantling.

"We believe that it should be dismantled on Syrian territory," Ryabkov was quoted as saying while attending an arms show in Nizhny Tagil. "We undoubtedly won't deal with it. We believe that the process of its destruction could be efficiently organised on the territory of Syria."

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), based in the Hague, is expected to agree to a provisional verification and disarmament plan on Sunday, following Syria's formal declaration of its chemical weapons, delivery systems and production facilities.

The OPCW plan would then require a UN resolution to put it into effect. Diplomats at the UN in New York confirmed that the resolution was nearly ready after Russia and western powers came to a compromise over whether the deal should include a threat of punitive measures in the event of Syrian non-compliance.

The compromise hammered out in New York means the enforcement measures will not be included in the initial resolution, but there will be text warning Syria that failure to comply will lead to a second resolution under chapter seven of the UN charter, which does envisage punitive measures including military action.

Another Russian deputy foreign minister, Gennady Gatilov, told the Associated Press that agreement on the draft was just two days away, and western diplomats in New York agreed that the main dispute had been resolved and that only technical issues remained to be settled. The resolution will not go to a vote, however, until after the OPCW announcement.

Syria this month applied to join the Chemical Weapons Convention after France and the US threatened air strikes in response to the chemical weapons attack on rebel-held suburbs in eastern Damascus on 21 August.

A subsequent UN investigation confirmed that sarin had been used in that attack, and gave estimates of the trajectories of the rockets used, which western powers and Human Rights Watch said demonstrated that blame lay with the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Damascus rejected the findings and Russia claimed that there had been a "rush to judgment".

UN weapons inspectors are now in Damascus investigating three other alleged chemical weapons attacks: one at the village of Khan al-Assal, near Aleppo, on 19 March, and at Saraqeb and Sheik Mahsood.

The inspection team will also be seeking further information on three more incidents in late August claimed by the Syrian regime to be linked to rebel forces. The government claims it has passed evidence to Moscow showing rebel involvement in chemical attacks, but that evidence has not been published.