“All of the video footage demonstrates that the convoy caught fire, which strangely happened nearly at exactly the same time as militants started a large scale offensive on Aleppo”, Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in a statement Tuesday.
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“All information on the convoy’s location (after that) was known only to the rebels controlling this area”, he said. USA officials told Reuters that Russian aircraft were in the skies above the convoy and that the United States believed Russia was responsible for the attack.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke before Kerry in more measured tones and for a lot less time. Twenty civilians were killed when the Syrian Red Crescent convoy was struck.
The attack drew worldwide condemnation and prompted the U.N.to temporarily suspend aid shipments in Syria, where some 6 million people live in besieged or hard-to-reach places.
Russia Wednesday charged a US drone was responsible for bombing a 31-truck United Nations aid convoy loaded with food and medicine in Syria, one day after the USA blamed Moscow and Tehran for the two-hour attack that killed 20 aid workers near Aleppo.
The Paris-based aid group initially said the attack Tuesday night leveled a medical triage facility it operates in rebel-held territory outside the contested city of Aleppo.
“This is not a joke”, Kerry said, sharply criticizing those who engage in “word games” to dodge responsibility over questions of “war and peace, life and death”.
One of many air strikes near Aleppo killed four medical workers and at least nine rebel fighters south of Aleppo. “The United States continues to believe there is a way forward that, although rocky and hard and uncertain, can provide the most viable path out of the carnage”, Kerry said.
“We have always put as a top priority resumption of the intra-Syrian political dialogue without preconditions”, said Lavrov.
The United Nations has since suspended all humanitarian aid convoys.
Lavrov was more direct in laying out what he presented as a series off truce violations by US -backed rebels groups near the northern city of Aleppo.
“To restore credibility to the process, we must move forward to try to immediately ground all aircraft flying in those key areas in order to de-escalate the situation and give a chance for humanitarian assistance to flow unimpeded”, he said.
Secretary of State John Kerry speaks during a Security Council Meeting on Wednesday.
A further attack on Tuesday night killed five medical workers for an worldwide aid agency.
He called for all planes in key areas of Syria to be immediately grounded and for countries to stop supporting those who sabotage ceasefire efforts.
Syrian government forces also launched a major advance in Hama province in the West of the country.
The Observatory says the plane crashed in the eastern Qalamoun mountains, northwest of Damascus.
The cease-fire was intended in part to allow humanitarian convoys to reach besieged and hard-to-reach areas throughout Syria.
Moscow backs Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government, while Washington supports numerous rebel factions fighting to topple him.
Syrian opposition activists say suspected government airstrikes in the northern city of Aleppo and the rebel-held Idlib province have killed 23 civilians, including at least five children.
He said: “Everybody in that room knows that and it’s up to people in that room to create the conditions for a ceasefire – they have done it before, they can do it again – and we know that the overwhelming responsibility for the failure to have a ceasefire, the overwhelming responsibility for the breaches in the ceasefire that we have seen lies with the Assad regime and indeed its sponsors”.
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United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon described the convoy strike as a “sickening, savage and apparently deliberate attack”.
