GORNY-MOSCOW, April 26: Russia, the possessor of the world’s largest stocks of chemical weapons, completed the first step in fulfilling its international obligations by destroying 400 tons of mustard gas, a Kremlin spokesman announced on Saturday.

“We have nothing to hide,” said the head of the commission for disposing of chemical weapons in the Volga region, Sergei Kiriyenko.

Kiriyenko was speaking from the town of Gorny where the first Russian facility for the elimination of chemical weapons was built with the help of German funds totalling 40 million euros.

“With the amount destroyed thus far, one could have annihilated a medium-sized European city,” the Interfax news agency quoted Kiriyenko as saying.

In the Volga region, a total of 1,200 tons of mustard gas, Lewisite blister agent, and other agents are to be eliminated by 2005.

As the successor state to the Soviet Union, Russia has registered over 40,000 tonnes of chemical agent. According to experts, conditions in the country’s seven known chemical weapons storage facilities are often poor, with containers of chemical agent badly corroded.

Moscow, which ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997, has until 2012 to eliminate all of its stockpiles of chemical agents.—dpa