U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his counterpart Sergey Lavrov exchanged blame in a public session on Syria at the U.N. Security Council.
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The United States and Russian Federation blamed each other for Syria’s failing cease-fire Wednesday, illustrating why a fractured U.N. Security Council has been unable for more than five years to do anything to stop the Arab country’s civil war.
The Russian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday that a U.S. Predator drone was in the area where a United Nations aid convoy was partially destroyed in Syria on Monday and had appeared on the scene minutes before the incident. Even that revelation failed to definitively implicate Russia because both the Russian and Syrian air forces fly the Su-24, although the US officials said there were strong indications that the jet was flown by the Russian military. He pointed to repeated Syrian attacks on civilians, detailed shifting Russian explanations about the aid convoy attack and ridiculed Moscow’s argument that political talks shouldn’t be burdened with preconditions.
The Russian military says a USA drone was flying over the area when an aid convoy was attacked in Syria on Monday.
He said the drone left the area about a half-hour after the attack.
Meanwhile, four aid workers were killed and one was critically injured Wednesday after an airstrike hit a medical clinic in northern Syria.
The U.S. and Russia support different parties to the war in Syria – Russia backs the government of President Bashar Assad, while the U.S.is allied with opposition groups.
Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu raised the stakes yesterday when he announced the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov would sail for the Mediterranean off the Syrian coast.
USA officials believe Russian planes dropped the bombs as food and medicine were being unloaded at a warehouse in a rebel held area to the west of Aleppo. He went over the changing narrative over an attack on an aid convoy that has included everything from claims of a justifiable counter-terror strike to vehicles spontaneously combusting.
Syrians living in opposition areas will be disproportionately affected because the U.N.’s major warehouses are located in government-held areas.
He said Monday’s attack, which killed 20 civilians, had raised profound doubt over whether Russian Federation and the Syrian government would live up to the terms of the ceasefire deal.
The strike, they added, was too sophisticated to have been carried out by the Syrian army.
The United States still believes there is a way forward to peacefully resolving the civil war in Syria, the US Secretary of State said. Yet following the convoy attack, the United Nations suspended overland aid operations in Syria.
Within one minute of the strike, the US tracked a Russian-made Su-24 directly over the region of the attack, US. officials said.
In further violence, a Syrian warplane was shot down Wednesday during a combat mission against ISIS in the eastern Qalamoun area near the capital, Damascus, but the pilot was rescued, Syrian state media reported, quoting a military source.
Nine rebel fighters were also killed during the bombardment, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The agency says the plane crashed in an area controlled by either the government or rebel factions, indicating it would not have pictures of the aircraft.
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Syrian government forces also launched a major advance in Hama province in the West of the country.
