MOSCOW: Moscow and Washington traded fierce diplomatic blows over Syria yesterday with US charges that Russia was pushing its ally into civil war and the Kremlin accusing the White House of being emotional.
The brisk exchange came just as President Vladimir Putin prepared to face a grilling today from the leaders of Germany and France during his first tour abroad since his May 7 inauguration to a controversial third term.
Russia has made clear from the start that Putin would not be swayed by Western and Arab world anger over his refusal to back action against a Middle East regime that Moscow has held patronage over since Soviet times.
“Russia’s position is well-known. It is balanced and consistent and completely logical,” Interfax quoted Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying.
“So it is hardly appropriate to talk about this position changing under someone’s pressure ... we know it actually could get much worse than it is,” she said.
But US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used some of her most explicit language to date to indicate that Washington’s patience with Moscow was running thin and that urgent action at the UN Security Council on Syria was required.
The Russians “are telling me they don’t want to see a civil war. I have been telling them their policy is going to help contribute to a civil war,” she told a mainly student audience on a visit to Copenhagen.
“We have to bring the Russians on board because the dangers we face are terrible.”
Peskov said Russia’s refusal to back further action against the regime after the Houla massacre and other attacks on civilians was based on an approach “completely free of emotions, which are hardly appropriated here.”
But Putin is still expected to face tough talk from both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande during a three-nation beginning in Belarus.
But Merkel said yesterday, the day before she hosts Putin that “Russia has cooperated constructively in the UN Security Council.”
“There were always times when we said ‘we want to go further’ but I think that we have to a certain extent common ground when it’s a question of ensuring human rights and finally ending these terrible human rights violations,” she said.
The New York Times has reported that one option being promoted in some Washington and Moscow circles involves a transition of power similar to that used to end president Ali Abdullah Saleh’s strongman rule in Yemen this year.
The transition would reportedly see Assad cede power to his inner circle for an interim period during which political talks with the opposition would be held.
Meanwhile, UN chief Ban Ki-moon warned yesterday of a “catastrophic civil war” in Syria after the Houla massacre.
“The massacres of the sort seen last weekend could plunge Syria into a catastrophic civil war, a civil war from which the country would never recover,” he told an Istanbul forum of the UN-led Alliance of Civilizations initiative.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday criticized Russia’s resistance to UN action on Syria, warning that its policy of propping up the Assad regime could contribute to a civil war.
The Russians “are telling me they don’t want to see a civil war. I have been telling them their policy is going to help contribute to a civil war,” she told a mainly student audience on a visit to Copenhagen.
Clinton warned that unless unchecked, the deadly violence in Syria could lead to civil war or even develop into a proxy war because of Iran’s support for the regime of Assad. “We have to bring the Russians on board because the dangers we face are terrible,” said Clinton, who is in Denmark on the first leg of a Scandinavian tour.
She said the absence of UN support for action in Syria, due mainly to Russia’s opposition, “makes it harder” to respond to the crisis, as the international community did last year in Libya.
“The continued slaughter of innocent people, both by the military and by militias supported by the government and increasingly by the opposition... could morph into a civil war in a country that would be riven by sectarian divides, which then could morph into a proxy war in the region. “Remember you have Iran deeply embedded in Syria — their military are coaching the Syrian military. The Quds Force, which is a branch of the military, is helping them set up these sectarian militias.
“We know it actually could get much worse than it is,” she said.
FROM: AGENCIES
