clear

Creating new perspectives since 2009

Putin wades in on Trump, calls US strikes on Syria ‘aggression’

April 7, 2017 at 2:34 pm

US Navy fires a land attack missile on 7 April 2017 [Robert S. Price/U.S. Navy/Handout/Anadolu]

Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned US cruise missile strikes on Syria as illegal on Friday, warning the move would further damage already battered US-Russia relations which Moscow had hoped President Donald Trump would revive.

US officials said they had informed Russian forces ahead of the strikes – intended to punish the Syrian regime for what a chemical weapons attack earlier this week that killed dozens of civilians – and had avoided hitting Russian personnel.

Satellite imagery suggests the Shayrat airbase that was struck in western Syria is home to Russian special forces and military helicopters, part of the Kremlin’s effort to help the Syrian regime of Bashar Al-Assad remain in power under the pretext of fighting Daesh and other militant groups.

Russia’s main airbase and a naval facility were not hit.

Moscow had been hoping to cooperate with Trump to jointly fight “terrorists” in Syria, a term used to generally described all anti-Assad forces as well as Daesh, in a move it was banking on to boost US-Russia ties which are at a post-Cold War low. After the US strikes, that task now looks harder.

In a statement, the Kremlin said:

President Putin views the US strikes on Syria as aggression against a sovereign state in violation of the norms of international law and on a made-up up pretext. This step by Washington will inflict major damage on US-Russia ties.

Putin, a staunch ally of Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad, was holding a meeting of Russia’s Security Council to discuss the strike on Friday afternoon and the Russian Foreign Ministry called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council over the weekend.

A foreign ministry statement said Moscow was suspending a Syrian air safety agreement with the United States originally drawn up to ensure that the two countries’ planes did not collide.

“It’s clear to any specialist that the decision to launch a strike was taken in Washington before the events in Idlib [the province where the gas poisoning took place] which were simply used as a pretext for a show of force,” the ministry said.

Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, told reporters the US strikes had been conducted to help rebel groups fighting Al-Assad.

Russia would keep military channels of communication open with Washington, but would not exchange any information through them, he added.

When asked whether Russia had deactivated its own anti-missile defence systems in Syria before the missile strike, Peskov declined to comment.

US-Russia ties in peril

The Russian Defence Ministry meanwhile mocked the effectiveness of the US strikes, saying only 23 missiles had found their targets. It was unclear where another 36 had landed, it said, promising Syrian air defences would now be beefed up.

A Russian frigate armed with Kalibr cruise missiles sailed through the Bosphorus en route to the eastern Mediterranean in the early hours of Friday morning, according to pictures taken by Turkish bloggers for their online Bosphorus Naval News project.

It was unclear if that was related to the US strikes.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said there were no reports of any Russians being hurt in the attack, adding he hoped US-Russia ties would not be irreparably hurt as a result.

Image of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov

Image of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is due to make his first visit to Moscow next week as the US’ top diplomat, an eagerly awaited event in Russia where politicians have been anxious to try to use the change of administration to reboot relations.

One senior Russian lawmaker, Leonid Slutsky, told the Russia 24 television channel on Friday Moscow should use the Tillerson visit to “try and talk sense into Washington”.

Syria, ironically, was one of the few areas where analysts believed Moscow and Washington might be able to find common ground.

The Kremlin says Washington’s allegations that the Syrian army possesses and used chemical weapons are flat out wrong and accuses the West of ignoring alleged rebel use of such weapons. It says scores of Syrians were killed by poison gas on Tuesday because the Syrian air force had struck a militant bomb-making factory which it said contained chemical weapons procured in Iraq.

Western countries have dismissed this version of events and say Syrian planes dropped the gas, which Al-Assad denies. Military and chemical weapons experts have also rubbished these claims, saying that sarin gas would itself be destroyed if subjected to explosives and munitions such as those that would have been used by Syrian warplanes in the Kremlin’s version of events.

The Kremlin said on Friday the US attack had thrown up a “serious obstacle” to the idea championed by Trump during his election campaign of creating an international coalition against terrorism.

Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the upper house’s international affairs committee, said it looked like Trump may have been pushed into approving military action by the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies.

“One way or another, Russian cruise missiles are continuing to strike terrorists and American ones government troops who are heading the war against the terrorists,” Kosachev wrote on social media.

I fear that with these approaches the hoped-for US-Russian anti-terrorism coalition in Syria…is breathing its last before it is even born.