Russia ‘could change position’ if Assad was cheating

Putin's chief of staff says Moscow might reconsider support if Syrian leader fails to give proper account of his chemical weapons.

MOSCOW // Russia could abandon support for Bashar Al Assad if it learnt that the Syrian president was not committed to handing over control of his chemical weapons arsenal, a senior Russian official said yesterday.

The comments by Sergei Ivanov, chief of staff for the Russian president Vladimir Putin, came as a United Nations-backed weapons watchdog confirmed that Syria had submitted a full list of its chemical weapons stockpiles, meeting the first deadline of an ambitious disarmament operation that averted the threat of western air strikes.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said it had “received the expected disclosure” from Damascus, 24 hours after saying it had been given a partial document from Syrian authorities.

Mr Ivanov also reiterated Russia’s long-standing opposition to western military intervention in Syria, saying that such action would only aid militants linked to Al Qaeda.

“In the event of external military interference the opposition would entirely lose interest in negotiations, considering that the US would bomb the regime to its foundations as in Libya, giving them an easy path to victory,” Mr Ivanov said in comments to a Stockholm conference organised by the British-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

He said that Russia expected to know the whereabouts of all Mr Al Assad’s chemical weapons within a week, although it would take two to three months to decide how long would be required to eliminate them.

“I’m talking theoretically and hypothetically, but if we became sure that Assad is cheating, we could change our position,” Mr Ivanov said.

The timetable for disarming Syria’s chemical arsenal was agreed upon by the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and the US secretary of state, John Kerry, a week ago in Geneva. Their deal to destroy Mr Al Assad’s chemical weapons by 2014 came after the weapons were used in an attack outside Damascus on August 21 that killed hundreds of civilians.

The US blamed the Assad regime for the attack, which it said killed 1,400 people, and threatened punitive air strikes, while Russia said it was not clear who was responsible.

Security experts said Syria had about 1,000 tonnes of mustard gas, VX and sarin – the nerve gas that UN inspectors confirmed had been used in the attack.

The OPCW executive is expected to accept the Lavrov-Kerry plan this week after which the UN Security Council is due to give its endorsement of the arrangements – marking a rare consensus after two years of East-West deadlock over Syria.

The US and Russia are divided over how to ensure compliance with the accord. The US president, Barack Obama, has warned that he is still prepared to attack Syria, even without a UN mandate, if Mr Al Assad reneges on the deal.

Russia, which has a veto in the council, opposes attempts by western powers to write in an explicit and immediate threat of penalties under what are known as Chapter VII powers.

While the Lavrov-Kerry accord has been welcomed internationally because of its potential to remove a toxic arsenal from Syria’s battlefield and possibly revive international efforts to press for a political solution to the civil war, it has done nothing in the short term to stem fighting with conventional weapons.

Rebel forces, some of whom accused the West of betrayal when Mr Obama deferred air strikes against Mr Al Assad’s forces three weeks ago, seized several villages south of Aleppo yesterday.

Their offensive was the latest effort to cut the regime’s supply lines to Syria’s biggest city, preventing reinforcements by road from Damascus to the south.

Video posted online showed rebels from the Tawhid brigade firing from a tank and a lorry-mounted machine gun at army positions near the Sheikh Said suburb south of Aleppo.

Further south, in Hama province, soldiers and pro-Assad militiamen killed at least 15 people, including a woman and two children, in the Sunni Muslim village of Sheikh Hadid, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The British-based group, which monitors violence in Syria through a network of activists and medical and security sources,said the killings followed attacks by rebels on military checkpoints in the area over the previous two days.

It said 26 people – 16 soldiers and 10 members of the pro-Assad National Defence Force – were killed when rebels attacked a nearby checkpoint on Thursday.

* Reuters