CNN describes “bickering” between Western and Russian diplomats struggling to hammer out the details of an agreement that would see the international community acting to seize Syria’s vast arsenal of chemical weapons:
The agreement, reached by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry over the weekend, calls for a U.N. resolution demanding that Syria turn over its chemical weapons to international control in a specific time frame.
Russia won’t support any resolution that would authorize the use of force against Syria if it doesn’t comply, Lavrov said Tuesday.
But the United States and France want to keep the threat of force on the table if Syria doesn’t comply. Those allies say they are convinced that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime was behind a chemical weapons attack in opposition areas that, according to U.S. estimates, killed more than 1,400 people.
Negotiators have found it difficult to reconcile those two positions. The proposal had already been written in a way that allowed Damascus to keep its biological weapons, which like its chemical weapons are classified as weapons of mass destruction.
The lack of progress being made in the multilateral talks is being taken, in some quarters, as an indication that a multilateral approach incorporating Russia and China is unlikely to productively resolve the Syrian conflict.