The Russian government dismissed the initial UN report after it was released, calling it "one-sided" and "distorted".
[34] On 17 September, Russian Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov reiterated his government's belief that the opposition carried out the attacks as a "provocation".
[35] The United Nations high representative for disarmament affairs,
Angela Kane, stated that the inspection team would review Russia's objections.
[36]
A Russian defence expert Ruslan Pukhov, said that the code found by the UN investigators on the M-14 munition showed it had been produced in 1967 by the Sibselmash plant in Novosibirsk for a
BM-14-17 multiple rocket launcher. He said that these weapons had been taken out of service by Syria and replaced with
BM-21s. The second projectile identified by weapons inspectors, he thought, looked to be ‘home made’.
[37] Eliot Higgins has posted evidence of the Syrian National Defence Forces using the munition type linked to the August 21 attack however, and has concluded that 'it now seems undeniable that the Syrian military has been using this family of munitions for at least the past 10 months.'
[38] An Iranian chemical weapons expert, Abbas Foroutan, said in October 2013 that the UN should publish more details about the investigation than were provided in the report, including victims' pulse rates and blood pressure and their response to the atropine treatment, the victims' levels of
acetylcholinesterase (sarin is an
acetylcholinesterase inhibitor), and more technical details on the lab testing process.