MOSCOW. April 9 (Interfax-AVN) - Construction branches of the Russian Defense Ministry will continue taking part in the chemical weapons destruction program in 2003, Lieutenant General Anatoly Grebenyuk, chief of the Armed Forces housing and construction department and deputy defense minister, said on Wednesday.
"The Defense Ministry's military construction network will continue taking part in the creation of facilities intended for destroying war gases, in the accommodation of enterprises and residential areas this year," Grebenyuk told Interfax-Military News Agency.
"The Federal Special Construction Service is the general contractor in the sphere of chemical weapons destruction, but, for instance, construction branches of the Defense Ministry accomplished nearly 60 percent of all work in the Gorny village of the Saratov region, where Russia's first full-scale chemical weapons destruction facility was launched in December last year," the general said.
"Organizations of the Defense Ministry are assigned serious missions in the framework of the construction of facilities in Leonidovka, Penza region, Shchuchye, Kurgan region, and several other localities," Grebenyuk stressed.
According to him, "involvement in the creation of infrastructure for scrapping chemical weapons has become very important for the Defense Ministry, for it made it possible to preserve military construction organizations that had had no work in several regions of the country.
Russia stockpiles a total of 40,000t of chemical weapons. They are kept in seven arsenals located in the Kirov, Penza, Kurgan, Saratov and Bryansk regions and in the internal republic of Udmurtia. Experts estimate the volume of expenses on destroying chemical weapons at about USD3bn.