Revealed: Russia rewrote Syrian history at the Hague
Among 68 pages of uncovered correspondence between the Russian Ambassador to the OPCW and the Director of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons indicate a fierce battle over truth.
Part of my work for the Ukrainian Defense Forces is to locate, analyze, and parse information that could be of interest to global events. Buried among these files was a reem of documents that, at first glance, seemed to show the normal back-and-forth obstinance of a low-level Russian Federation ambassador arguing and threatening a relatively obscure official from one of the many international organizations headquartered at the Hague. Dating to the closing days of 2020, Alexander Shulgin, Moscow’s diplomat to the OPCW, furiously and comedically pushed back against Fernando Arias, the Director General of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, on multiple topics. Also looped in was the German Ambassador to the OPCW, Gudrun Linger.
While the vast majority of the correspondence focused on the Kremlin’s poisoning of now-deceased Putin foil, Alexander Navalny, in hindsight, several throwaway lines by Shulgin ties directly to Russia to what is now an explosive war crimes investigation unfolding in Syria. While Syria is the main focus of this piece, for those interested Navalny you will want to read to the end, as the details into the case around him are extensive and stunning.
As the calendar turned to 2025, two freelance journalists based in Kyiv, Caolan Robertson, and Audrey Macalpine, traversed from the battle-scared Ukrainian capital to investigate the war crimes of the recently deposed Assad regime in Syria. The duo, he a Brit, she an American, touched down in Beirut and sojourned across the Syrian border on New Year’s Eve to follow up on a tale so sordid that it could only accepted as true thanks to perpetrators of the conspiracy they raced to prove. Residents of Douma, whose population was exposed to a horrific chemical weapons attack in 2018 orchestrated by Al-Assad, made a stunning claim to the intrepid pair. According to multiple witnesses speaking exclusively to Roberston and Macalpine, under threat of torture and forcibly coerced by Russian security forces at the direction of Vladimir Putin, they were forced to give false testimony to The Hague in 2018 relating to the unfathomable war crime they endured. Robertson spoke briefly about their work to the Times Radio yesterday, the clip is below:
While the knowledge of the false testimony was widely reported and accepted, I won’t write more about what the two journalists found that makes the new revelations so stunning. The proof they acquired thus far convinced me to release the letters you see here. In a conversation with Robertson, specifically because freedom of the press means making sure journalists have all the tools to do their jobs, I agreed to provide him with the packet but also clarified that releasing everything to the public was necessary for transparency and context.
Below, you will find the missives unredacted. They are in a combination of English and Russian.
