Russia Sought to Sway Weapons Watchdog Vote Using Disinformation

Russia used disinformation and unsubstantiated claims in a plan to lobby officials in at least a dozen countries as part of an unsuccessful bid to retain a seat on the board of the international chemical weapons watchdog.

The Russian Foreign Ministry sent a memo to its embassies in several countries – including Turkey, Mexico, Brazil, and the Philippines – setting out Moscow’s talking points ahead of a vote last week to decide the executive council of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW, according to people familiar with the matter and documents seen by Bloomberg.

The papers accuse the US and its “satellites” and “vassal countries” of wanting to transform the Hague-based OPCW into an instrument to promote their own interests and suppress alternative opinions. Preventing Russia from getting reelected to the board of the group is cast as part of that plan, said the people on condition of anonymity to discuss the memo’s content.

Moscow sought to urge those it lobbied to challenge what it called the unrestrained politicization of the OPCW and to protect the body from “final destruction.” Despite those efforts, Russia received the fewest votes of any nominated country, and lost out to Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania for board membership.

Moscow was deeply frustrated by the outcome and is investigating what went wrong, one of the people said.

The Russian Foreign Ministry didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The result was welcomed by Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. “OPCW is a very reputable international body and terrorists have no place in it,” he posted on the platform X.

The vote underscores Moscow’s waning influence in international organizations as a result of its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and is indicative of how few friends it has in some of these bodies, despite intense lobbying efforts. Russia has been suspended from the Council of Europe, the UN Human Rights Council and the global anti-money laundering group Financial Action Task Force. On Friday, the country failed to win reelection to the governing council of the International Maritime Organization.

Moscow’s relationship with the OPCW had been clouded before Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine. In 2018, a group of Russian spies were caught trying to hack the international body to gain access to an investigation into a nerve-agent attack targeting Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer living in the UK.

Among the talking points pushed by the Russian Foreign Ministry ahead of the OPCW vote was a claim that the “Skripal case” was mounted by the British secret service. Another argued the “alleged poisoning” of opposition politician Alexey Navalny in 2020 was similarly provoked by Germany.

There is ample evidence that Russian intelligence was behind both attacks.

Offering a window into how the Kremlin uses its diplomatic network to spread disinformation internationally, the memo repeats unsubstantiated claims that the US has provided Ukraine with “toxic chemicals,” and that Kyiv, foreign mercenaries and Ukrainian militants planned to use those alleged deliveries to create “provocations.”