Russia tells United States its plan to disarm Syria's chemical weapons

Russia has sent a proposal to the United States outlining its plan for Syria to cede control of its chemical arsenal

NEW YORK // Russia sent a proposal to the United States yesterday outlining its plan for the Assad regime to cede control of its chemical arsenal.
The US secretary of state John Kerry will meet Russia's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in Geneva today for talks on the disarmament, a process that would avert US-led military strikes on Syria.
Russia has provided no details of the plan and several western nations are sceptical about the Kremlin's intentions. They say Russia's diplomatic efforts could be a tactic to stall US strikes.
"We handed over to the Americans a plan to place chemical weapons in Syria under international control. We expect to discuss it in Geneva," a source in the Russian delegation to the talks said.
Barack Obama threatened limited strikes against Syria after being presented with evidence that Bashar Al Assad used poison gas to kill more than 1,400 people near Damascus last month.
The Russian proposal has bought Mr Obama some time as he has faced opposition to military action from critics at home and abroad.
Diplomacy "holds the potential to remove the threat of chemical weapons without the use of force", Mr Obama said in a televised address to the nation on Tuesday.
He will give Russia's diplomacy time to play out but both the US and France have warned Mr Al Assad that air strikes remain an option.
The UN Security Council also met late yesterday to discuss plans to place Syrian chemical weapons under international control.
Envoys from the US, UK, China, France and Russia were expected to hold talks about a US-backed French draft resolution that would give Mr Al Assad 15 days to account for his stockpile of chemical weapons.
Russia has rejected the prospect of a binding UN resolution, which Mr Lavrov said was unacceptable.
Given Damascus's recent history of deception over its chemical weapons, which until this week it denied having, and Moscow's staunch military and political support for Mr Al Assad, analysts have questioned Moscow's diplomatic manoeuvring.
"Russia's plan is likely aimed more at scuttling strikes than at actually rounding up Assad's chemical arsenal," said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group political-risk consultancy.
Without a strategy in place to end the war, "Syrians will become the victims of the international effort to bring the country's chemical weapons under control", said Marina Ottaway, a senior Middle East expert at the Woodrow Wilson Centre think tank.
"There is a real danger that as international actors plunge deeply into the difficult negotiations on how to secure Syria's chemical arsenal, they will forget about the broader conflict," she said.
Mr Obama's speech on Tuesday left many unanswered questions about the political and logistical challenges of the Russian plan that was suddenly embraced by the White House on Monday.
The US president stumbled on the face-saving option after an apparently off-the-cuff comment by Mr Kerry that was followed by a flurry of diplomatic activity by Russia.
Observers say finding and destroying all of Mr Al Assad's chemical weapons would take years or may be all but impossible.
"The known sites are actually in zones of conflict where the battle lines are changing literally on a day-to-day basis," said Amy Smithson, a chemical weapons expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California.
Weapons inspectors from the UN would have to protected by international forces, sometimes behind opposition lines, requiring a ceasefire that rebels have said they would not agree to.
An estimated 75,000 troops would be required to protect inspectors, secure sites and build the facilities necessary for destroying the weapons, according to Pentagon figures.
Verifying that all the weapons stocks had been handed over would also be difficult to achieve.
But even before such logistical problems can be addressed, the diplomatic and political negotiations getting to that point could take months, and Mr Obama offered no deadline for how long he would wait for diplomacy to work.
His speech and statements by US officials indicate little patience for a drawn-out process. "It has to be swift, it has to be real, and it has to be verifiable," a White House official said. "It can't be a delaying tactic, and if the UN Security Council seeks to be the vehicle to make it happen, well then it can't be a debating society."
If a final deal over Mr Al Assad's chemical weapons is agreed, analysts fear it may solidify the Syrian government's advantage over the opposition by allowing Mr Obama to show he had acted over his chemical weapons "red line", but without the military action that could have benefited the rebels.
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* Additional reporting by Reuters