MOSCOW, March 2 (AVN) - Only French and British companies will take part in the EU-financed Russian chemical weapons utilisation projects under the auspices of the TACIS programme, the Military News Agency learned on Thursday.
The volume of financing of the projects will make seven million euro. Preparations for decontamination of the lewisite production facility in the territory of the Kaprolaktam enterprise will cost four million euro. The facility is located in the town of Dzerzhinsk in the central Russian Nizhny Novgorod region.
The remaining money will be spent on establishment of the environment monitoring system at the chemical weapons elimination plant which is under construction near the village of Gorny in the central Russian Saratov region. Seven such plants will be built in Russia.
"Starting from 1997, when the convention on elimination chemical weapons began to develop, most of the money allocated for this purpose was misused in Russia," an expert of the State Duma defence committee told the Agency. The TACIS management is not willing to repeat the past mistakes, and that is the reason Russian companies were left out of the projects, he stressed.