Here's one for the Surprise-o-meter. Edited for brevity.Russia angrily denied allegations Thursday that Russian forces had smuggled a cache of high explosives out of Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion in March 2003. Defense Ministry spokesman Vyacheslav Sedov dismissed the allegations as "absurd" and "ridiculous." "I can state officially that the Russian Defense Ministry and its structures couldn't have been involved in the disappearance of the explosives, because all Russian military experts left Iraq when the international sanctions were introduced during the 1991 Gulf War," he told The Associated Press.
We all know how sacrosanct those sanctions were to Russia.