RT reports:
The West has “no appetite” for a military intervention in Syria, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Saturday. At the same time, Moscow’s intelligence shows the Arab country’s chemical arsenal is “so far” secured, he revealed.
“No one has any appetite for intervention. Behind the scenes, I have a feeling they are praying that Russia and China go on blocking intervention, as sanctioning it would mean they must act – and they are not ready,” Lavrov told journalists on a flight back to Moscow from an EU summit in Brussels.
The FM was assessing the current mood in the UN Security Council after NATO cleared the stationing of Patriot missiles in Turkey. Ankara and the alliance say this is a containment tool to prevent any further Syrian violence from spilling over the border, but political analysts believe the step might signal the West and their Middle East allies are preparing to intervene in Syria.
Chemical weapons ‘so far’ secured, but US needs to ‘decide on priorities’
Syria’s chemical arsenal remains one of the major international concerns since the topic first emerged in July. Lavrov says that President Bashar Assad’s government is doing whatever’s possible to secure the weapons.
“So far, the arsenal is under control. The Syrian authorities have gathered all the stock in one or two locations. It used to be scattered all over the country,” the FM said adding that Moscow and Washington’s intelligence agree on the matter.
Syria is reportedly in possession of nerve agents, including mustard gas, as well as the Scud missiles needed to deliver them. The country is a non-signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention, which outlaws their production.
Since July, Assad’s government has repeatedly stated that chemical weapons will not be used on Syria, but Syrian officials have not excluded the possibility they might be deployed in the event of “a foreign attack.”
The threat has drawn international condemnation.
The EU, US and many others are also worried that Syria’s chemical weapons might fall into the hands of the Syrian rebels, some of whom have links to Al-Qaeda.
But Lavrov pointed out at some inconsistency in Washington’s approach where the chemical arsenal issues overlap with US support for the Syrian opposition.
“Our American partners admit that the main threat is rebels seizing the chemical arsenal. The opposition forces include all kinds of groups even ones the US has recently proclaimed terror groups. We tell them: ‘Guys but you support the opposition and its armed struggle. This armed struggle might result in exactly what you fear. You decide on your priorities.’ But there is no clear response to that,” said Lavrov.
Russia refuses to act as an intermediary trying to Assad into fleeing, Lavrov also said. At the same time Moscow is not going to accommodate the Syrian president should he step down: “Assad is not going anywhere, no matter what anyone says, be it China or Russia.”
On being asked whether the rebels will eventually oust President Assad, Lavrov replied: “Listen, no one is going to win this war.”
The situation in Syria remains volatile with new deaths reported daily by human rights groups. According to those reports, the death toll in the country which has been engulfed in the civil unrest since March 2011 has exceeded 40,000 people. The UN Human Rights Committee also says the conflict made 164,000 refugees.
Moscow insists the Syrian conflict should be resolved through direct and unconditional negotiations between the government and opposition. Russia insists the country should be given the right to self-determination and neither side should be supported.
The US, the UK, France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and a number of other countries in the West and the Middle East, on the other hand, call on President Assad to step down immediately and grant financial and military support to the Syrian opposition forces. But despite all the support, the Syrian National Coalition which was deemed to become an umbrella for all the Syrian opposition groups still failed to unify Assad’s opponents and therefore does not have leverage on all the forces fighting the goverment’s troops on the ground.
The UN says the Syrian war is growing more sectarian than civic with each day and that there is no end in sight to the conflict.
Here is what Walter Russell Mead has to say:
“Putin Whistles in the Dark As Mother Russia Declines”
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/12/23/putin-whistles-in-the-dark-over-mother-russias-demography/
On the one hand, Mead makes one good point:
“Much worse from President Putin’s point of view, one suspects, is the question — not addressed in the FT article or mentioned much in polite company in Russia — of just who is having babies in Russia today. Anecdotal evidence suggests strongly that the ethnic Russians are still dying out and that they are having many fewer children proportionately than the many non-Russian nationalities on the territory of the Federation. Muslim nationalities, in particular, may have substantially higher birthrates than Russian speaking Slavs.
“Putin has to know this is true, and has to know something of what it means.”
On the other hand, given America’s own problems, I wonder just who is whistling in the dark. The original Cold War became a race to see who could collapse first – Russia or America. Russia collapsed first, and seems (at least temporarily) to be rebounding.
Will America similarly rebound after its own upcoming collapse? That is the big question. I don’t think there is enough social capital left for that, but history is full of surprises.
What happened in the USSR is quite similar to what happened to Germany in 1918. It wasn’t truly a defeat, but a call of reason: after decades of Communist madness, all of a sudden the people and even the elites in the USSR realized that what they had been doing and seeking was absurd. The Russian Federation is not the USSR, among other differences, because it doesn’t want to impose a political or economical doctrine over the entire world, it doesn’t seek to build a global empire.
I think the US is at a similar point in history now. More and more people realize all the falsehood of their “democractic” ideals. But is the same happening to the elite? It doesn’t seem so. And this is what makes the US collapse much more dangerous than the Soviet one. The elites in the USSR knew that it was useless to try to keep the empire alive; will the finantial and political elite of the US realize this soon, also?
More confirmation of Mead’s thesis, from a Russian Orthodox source:
http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/58273.htm
“It is hard to exaggerate the demographic straits that Mother Russia finds itself in. According to the projections of the UN Population Division—we are speaking here of the so-called “low variant,” historically the most accurate—the Russian population will shrink by more than 30 million by mid-century if current trends continue. The population will age rapidly, from an average age of 37.9 in 2010 to and average age of 49 by 2050. In other words, most Russians will be beyond their childbearing years, and Russia’s demographic fate will be sealed..