DEFENSE/RUSSIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia presided over the destruction of his country’s last declared chemical weapons on Wednesday, describing the elimination as a ‘historic event’ and complaining that the United States has failed to purge its own chemical arsenal…
In Washington, a State Department official said that the United States ‘fully complies’ with the treaty and had continued to destroy the remnants of its stockpile, which are stored in Pueblo, Colo., and Richmond, Ky. ‘The United States remains committed to the complete destruction of its declared chemical weapons stockpile by the end of 2023,’ the official said.
Both Russia and the United States — which hold the world’s biggest stockpiles — were supposed to destroy all of their chemical weapons by 2012 under an international agreement, the Chemical Weapons Convention, that they each signed in 1993 and which went into force in 1997. The final deadline for the elimination of chemical weapons was initially set for 2007. But with neither of the two countries close to meeting that goal, the deadline was extended to 2012.
Neither Russia nor the United States met that new deadline either, although Mr. Putin boasted on Wednesday that Russia was three years ahead of a 2020 deadline it had set for itself.”
-Andrew Higgins, “Russia Destroys Chemical Weapons, and Faults U.S. for Not Doing So,” The New York Times online, Sept. 27, 2017