“Russia Calls U.N. Chemical Report on Syria Biased” is an article published in the New York Times surveying the latest developments in the Syria negotiations.
“Russia sharply criticized the new United Nations reporton Syria’s chemical arms use on Wednesday as biased and incomplete,” the article’s opening statement reads.
“The Russians also escalated their critiques of Western governments’ interpretations of the report, which offered the first independent confirmation of a large chemical weapons assault on Aug. 21 on the outskirts of Syria’s capital, Damascus, that asphyxiated hundreds of civilians” the author writes.
“Although the report did not assign blame for that assault to either side in Syria’s civil war, analyses of some of the evidence it presented point directly at elite military forces loyal to Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad,” the article reports.
“Russian news reports quoted the country’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei A. Ryabkov, as saying during a visit to Damascus that Syria’s government had provided additional information that showed insurgents used chemical weapons not only on Aug. 21 but also on other occasions.The Syrians offered no such information to the United Nations chemical weapons inspectors before they left Syria with a trove of forensic samples on Aug. 31,” the author writes.
“We are unhappy about this report... We think that the report was distorted. It was one-sided. The basis of information upon which it is built is insufficient,” the article quotes Mr. Ryabkov.
“Russia, which like the other permanent Security Council members has veto power, is resisting coercive language in the draft offered by the Western members that could lead to military intervention in Syria. The Russian position appeared intended to sow enough doubt to call into question additional pressure on Syria’s government, and perhaps to cloud evidence that at least some of the country’s arsenal was of Soviet origin,” the article concludes.
