Russia said yesterday the Syrian regime had handed over new evidence implicating rebels in a deadly poison gas attack, as divisions re-emerged between Moscow and the West after a landmark deal to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons.
Despite a weekend agreement between the US and Russia aimed at dismantling Syria’s chemical arsenal by the middle of next year, the two sides remained at loggerheads in their assessment of the Aug. 21 attack outside Damascus that left hundreds of people dead.
While US President Barack Obama said it was “inconceivable” that anyone other than the Syrian regime could have carried out the attack, Russia slammed as “biased and one-sided” a UN report that the West says proves the regime’s guilt.
Aake Sellstroem, who led the UN team that compiled the report, said that the inspectors would be returning to Syria “soon” to investigate further allegations of chemical weapons use.
Russian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Ryabkov said yesterday after the first of two days of talks in Damascus that the Syrian regime has handed Russia new materials implicating rebels in the attack that horrified the world.
“The corresponding materials were handed to the Russian side. We were told that they were evidence that the rebels are implicated in the chemical attack,” Ryabkov was quoted as saying by the RIA Novosti and ITAR-TASS news agencies after talks with Syrian Minister of Foreign Affairs Walid al-Muallem late on Tuesday.
He said Russia would “examine the Syrian materials implicating the rebels with the utmost seriousness.”
To the fury of the West, Russia has repeatedly expressed suspicion that the chemical attack was a “provocation” staged by the rebels with the aim of attracting Western military intervention in the conflict.
Ryabkov also said Russia was disappointed with the report into the chemical weapons attack published by UN inspectors this week, saying it was selective and had ignored other episodes.
“Without a full picture ... we cannot describe the character of the conclusions as anything other than politicized, biased and one-sided,” he said, quoted by RIA Novosti.
The US and its allies maintain the attack was carried out by Syrian government forces, and believe the assessment released by UN experts on Monday backed their view.
“When you look at the details of the evidence they present — it is inconceivable that anybody other than the regime used” the chemical weapons, Obama said in an interview on the Spanish-language Telemundo network.
Ryabkov is on a visit to Damascus to emphasize to the Syrian regime the importance of implementing “swiftly and strictly” the agreement between Moscow and Washington to rid Syria of its chemical weapons.
The Russian embassy confirmed he had met Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus yesterday, without giving further details, RIA Novosti said.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Tuesday he would meet the foreign ministers of the five key nations in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, and three days later, with the top diplomats of the US and Russia, to help resolve the Syria crisis.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS