“Under the conservatives, Britain has a simple message for the Kremlin: if you try to intimidate this country, if you use chemical weapons, if you don’t play by the international rules, the price will always be too high,” Hunt said at the Conservative Party Conference.
On March 4, Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a bench at a shopping center in the UK city of Salisbury, which prompted London to accuse Moscow of having poisoned the Skripals with what UK experts claim was the A234 nerve agent. The country's Porton Down lab has said, however, that it could not prove that the nerve agent used in the attack was made in Russia or determine its country of origin.
Russia has also stressed that it remains committed to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), while its arsenal of chemical weapons was fully destroyed, which was confirmed by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in September 2017.
Russian President Vladimir Putin repeatedly noted that the United States, in contrast, was not meeting its obligations on eliminating its chemical weapons, remaining the only major owner of chemical warfare agents in the world and shifting its deadline for the destruction of chemical weapons from 2007 to 2023.