Three foreign ministers also published a joint statement, which stressed the continuity of joint efforts to decrease violence in the field.

The statement put a strong emphasis on the territorial integrity of Syria and added that the next meeting in Astana would be held in mid-May.

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"I would like to inform you that the Russian embassy in London has dispatched several diplomatic notes to the Foreign Office with the goal of starting an active dialogue with officials in London over the state of affairs that ensued as a result of the use of poisonous chemicals on British soil," she said. "Four notes were dispatched in all. In reply we got non-committal messages meaning nothing."

"Russia has officially expressed readiness to work, using all the mechanisms and tools of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), but London has been unwilling to cooperate with us within the legal framework, and the trend is only growing," she said.

"We are again officially calling on Great Britain to provide all the materials on the incident, as they call it, with the spread of chemical weapons on UK territory," the diplomat said.

"They invented a story that Moscow had allegedly used a chemical substance in the UK. Why did we need to do that in the spring of 2018? Have reasonable people asked themselves such a question? What could be the reason to do that, who is the beneficiary?" she said. "Beneficiaries are those who have been inventing stories of Russian aggression for the past several years," Zakharova added.

"It requires a large-scale campaign to stimulate internal processes," Zakharova said. "I have no doubts that as far as Prime Minister Theresa May is concerned, the whole affair has internal underlying factors, too."

"The leader of a nuclear country appears in parliament to groundlessly accuse another country of aggression against Britain, set 24-hour deadlines and declare ultimatums. Generally speaking, a national leader acts regardless of any realities, and this is most dangerous and risky," Zakharova said. "There is no link with the real state of affairs at all."
...
"We have been given no data. Why aren't all the international mechanisms involved? Why does not this happen? It is obvious that there is the desire to bring this anti-Russian campaign to a new level," she stressed.

The UK has actually been squeezing Russian diplomats out of the country over the past few years refusing to extend their visas, she said. "Russian diplomats have literally been squeezed out for several years, with all sorts of obstacles created by UK officials, in particular, through visa mechanisms," she said.

"Visas have not actually been extended to many staff members of our embassy and diplomats," Zakharova stressed. She described that as "visa war." "Everything was done to make the work of the Russian Embassy's staff members in Britain as difficult as possible," Zakharova said.

"During high-level meetings, at the foreign ministers' level, Russia has repeatedly proposed to remedy the situation, because at some point we realized that all this is done deliberately and is no coincidence," the diplomat stressed.

"The recent developments are just the most impossible nonsense, logic does not help," she said. "The scale and scope of the use of media and public diplomacy, including addresses to the Security Council and parliament - all this makes the picture complete," Zakharova noted. In response to a question by foreign reporters as to what consequences the Skripal situation could have, the Russian Foreign Ministry's spokeswoman said that "all this is actually very dangerous for global peace and stability."

The foreign minister criticized coverage of the incident on Friday, saying Western media were failing to honestly report on the complexity of the situation. "I watched CNN and the BBC today. Their coverage of the story is very simplistic. They said Britain won support and solidarity from France, Germany and the United States, they all demanded an explanation about why Russia poisoned that colonel. And Russia denies poisoning him. That's all," he said.

However, the nuances of the story have been omitted, Lavrov added. Those include the fact that investigation of the incident is still underway, and that Britain has failed to adhere to the rules of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on how such cases should be handled. The fact that Russia was stonewalled by London when it requested evidence to support the accusations has also been ignored.

"The media professionals from the BBC and other outlets do not tell all those things to their Western audiences. They oversimplify things and make suggestive faces," the Russian minister said. "They put things into the people's heads. I guess those are the methods favored by Western propaganda. I hope we will never sink to such methods."