RUSSIA, U.S. TRY TO FIX CEASEFIRE.
NEW YORK • Another city, another Syria meeting. Another failure.
Tuesday’s gathering of the top U.S. and Russian diplomats, and more than a dozen of their Arab and European counterparts, ended with ritual reaffirmation of a ceasefire that has all but disintegrated, and promises of future negotiations. But it left Syria no closer to peace.
The familiar storyline came as the five-year-old civil war threatened to enter a darker phase as the United Nations denounced what it called a deliberate attack on a humanitarian convoy, which killed 20 civilians.
“Just when we think it cannot get any worse, the bar of depravity sinks lower,” Secretary General Ban Kimoon said.
The world body suspended aid deliveries and a Syrian human rights group reported that the Syrian government launched an offensive north of Aleppo in a bid to tighten the siege on rebelheld parts of the city.
Still, the diplomats insisted the ceasefire wasn’t dead. With few alternatives for trying to end the conflict, they pressed on with a strategy that appeared to impress few and convince no one.
The discussion led by Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov lasted only about an hour, after the two met privately beforehand. Goals were modest, focused on holding onto what might be salvageable from a weekold truce that had at least temporarily reduced the bloodshed. Gone were the loftier ambitions of creating a new, U.S.-Russian military partnership.
What was left Tuesday was a return to shelling and airstrikes in places that had hoped to receive critical food and medicine, and angry denials from Russia that it was responsible for the convoy attack, which struck when trucks were being off-loaded in western Aleppo.
U.S. officials, while not definitively blaming Moscow and its Syrian client, noted that they were the only ones flying anywhere near the area at the time.