Russia and the EU must overcome their differences on the crisis in Syria to prevent a full-scale civil war, the EU president said yesterday after talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
EU President Herman Van Rompuy, who is in Russia with EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso to meet with Putin, said after the talks that the EU and Russia “might have some divergent assessments” over the situation in Syria.
Standing side-by-side with Putin, Van Rompuy said both the EU and Russia needed to overcome their differences to ensure that the violence was halted.
Putin did not explicitly address the situation in Syria and none of the questions asked by reporters at the tightly controlled news conference touched on the issue.
However, he alluded to the differences with the EU in his opening statement, without going into details of the closed-door talks.
“We discussed the most outstanding international and regional political issues,” Putin said.
“This, of course, is the situation in Syria, Iran, the Middle East and several other regions,” he said. “Of course, our positions do not coincide on every issue or in everything.”
In China, the top state newspaper warned yesterday that any Western-backed military intervention in Syria would unleash even bloodier chaos, and said abandoning envoy Annan’s peace plan could push Syria into the “abyss” of full-scale war.
The People’s Daily, the main newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, spelled out the reasons for Beijing’s opposition to a tougher response to the massacre last month of 108 people in Houla, which Western and Arab governments blamed on forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The paper also warned that “external forces are not qualified to meddle.”
“It is easy to imagine the turmoil that would occur should Syria erupt into all-out civil war, triggering Western military intervention,” said a commentary in the paper, which generally reflects Chinese government thinking.
In Syria, rebels killed at least 80 army soldiers over the weekend, an opposition watchdog said yesterday, in a surge of attacks that followed their threat to resume fighting if al-Assad failed to observe a UN-backed ceasefire. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said doctors had confirmed the names of 80 dead government soldiers.
RETHINK? The defense ministry and Navy Command Headquarters could take over the indigenous submarine project and change its production timeline, a source said Admiral Huang Shu-kuang’s (黃曙光) resignation as head of the Indigenous Submarine Program and as a member of the National Security Council could affect the production of submarines, a source said yesterday. Huang in a statement last night said he had decided to resign due to national security concerns while expressing the hope that it would put a stop to political wrangling that only undermines the advancement of the nation’s defense capabilities. Taiwan People’s Party Legislator Vivian Huang (黃珊珊) yesterday said that the admiral, her older brother, felt it was time for him to step down and that he had completed what he
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE: More than five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 5.5 on the Richter scale shook eastern Taiwan in rapid succession yesterday afternoon Back-to-back weather fronts are forecast to hit Taiwan this week, resulting in rain across the nation in the coming days, the Central Weather Administration said yesterday, as it also warned residents in mountainous regions to be wary of landslides and rockfalls. As the first front approached, sporadic rainfall began in central and northern parts of Taiwan yesterday, the agency said, adding that rain is forecast to intensify in those regions today, while brief showers would also affect other parts of the nation. A second weather system is forecast to arrive on Thursday, bringing additional rain to the whole nation until Sunday, it
CONDITIONAL: The PRC imposes secret requirements that the funding it provides cannot be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Emma Reilly said China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday. At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is
CHINA REACTS: The patrol and reconnaissance plane ‘transited the Taiwan Strait in international airspace,’ the 7th Fleet said, while Taipei said it saw nothing unusual The US 7th Fleet yesterday said that a US Navy P-8A Poseidon flew through the Taiwan Strait, a day after US and Chinese defense heads held their first talks since November 2022 in an effort to reduce regional tensions. The patrol and reconnaissance plane “transited the Taiwan Strait in international airspace,” the 7th Fleet said in a news release. “By operating within the Taiwan Strait in accordance with international law, the United States upholds the navigational rights and freedoms of all nations.” In a separate statement, the Ministry of National Defense said that it monitored nearby waters and airspace as the aircraft