The State Department announced Monday that the United States had broken off talks with Russia of implementing a ceasefire agreement in the Syrian Civil war, as the Kremlin continued to back an aggressive bombing campaign in rebel-held parts of Aleppo.
Reuters has more:
“The United States is suspending its participation in bilateral channels with Russia that were established to sustain the cessation of hostilities,” U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement. Secretary of State John Kerry last spoke to his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, on Saturday, a senior State Department official said, after Kerry threatened last week to walk away from the talks. In Moscow, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told Russian news agencies the United States was trying to shift blame onto Russia, which in recent days had tried to sustain the agreement. But Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, supported by Iranian-backed militia and Russian air power, have since last week stepped up their offensive against rebel-held areas of Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city, bombing hospitals and damaging water supplies. A U.S. intelligence official said the bombing campaign was “one of the deadliest” since the civil war erupted in 2011.
The Americans and Russians struck a ceasefire last month, but Russian involvement in escalating the violence provoked public doubt from the U.S. government that their supposed partners would maintain their end of the bargain.
The collapse of diplomacy and President Barack Obama’s reluctance to engage in Syria beyond political talk leaves the administration with no options, despite the president’s request for them from his staff, Lee Smith writes:
Obama wants peace, and options. “There hasn’t been probably a week that’s gone by in which I haven’t reexamined some of the underlying premises around how we’re dealing with the situation in Syria,” Obama said last week. The war in Syria haunts him. “It haunts me constantly,” he told Vanity Fair. Of course, there are problems in the world that can’t be solved. “There are going to be some bad things that happen around the world,” said Obama, “and we have to be judicious.” And that’s why the president is asking for options. “The conventional arguments about what could have been done are wrong,” Obama said. A no-fly—wrong. Buffer zone—wrong. Arming rebels to topple Assad—wrong. Strikes against Assad regime targets—wrong. Over the last five plus years, Obama dismissed all the “conventional arguments” made by his staff, from which he is now asking for different options.
Read it all here.
