INTERVIEW WITH YURI FEDOTOV
DEPUTY MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS

RUSSIAN MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS

February 26, 2003

Question: Today in Moscow US Under Secretary of State John Bolton said US President George W. Bush has not yet taken a final decision on a military operation in Iraq. The US has prepared a new draft resolution on Iraq, but so far has not submitted it for voting. How does the Russian side assess the American proposals? Can they provide the basis for a compromise?

Deputy Minister Fedotov: What the British-US draft resolution is essentially about is to acknowledge that the UN inspections in Iraq have failed and, thus, the way is opening for the use of force. Naturally the question arises how well is this conclusion substantiated and to what extent it relies on the findings of the international inspectors.

A regular session of the UNMOVIC board of directors is being held in New York these days. During this session Hans Blix is to discuss, and then submit to the United Nations Security Council the next quarterly report, from which I think it will be obvious to all that an unprecedentedly strong international inspection potential is accumulated in Iraq at present. The previous UN Special Commission did not have such capacities; indeed, there were no such capacities in any single country of the world. The task, evidently, is to make full use of this inspection mechanism.

Another aspect of the situation is that Iraq is opening unimpeded access to all of its sites, providing documents, and organizing interviews with Iraqi scientists who participated in WMD programs. That is to say, Iraqi cooperation with the United Nations proceeds unfailingly. However, there are questions left open since the inspectors withdrew from Iraq in 1998, and that's why Hans Blix is currently preparing a report on the so called outstanding disarmament tasks. As soon as this report is submitted to the Security Council and approved, there will appear a kind of scale for scoring the degree of Iraqi cooperation with the UN and it will be possible to put specific questions to Iraq about various aspects of its banned military programs and to assess to what extent Baghdad is cooperating with the UN.