Plan by U.S., Russia for a new deal on Syria unravels
Breakdown comes amid more violence
NEW YORK — In a New York hotel room earlier this week, Russia thought it was close to a deal with the U.S. to revive a cease-fire deal for Syria.
A three-day period of calm would go into effect, accompanied by Syrian and Russian planes leaving the skies over northern Syria, according to a concept that Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov developed late Wednesday night. That would permit Syria’s warring sides to reaffirm their support and prove their commitment to a U.S.-Russian plan for ending the civil war.
But neither government had signed off on the diplomats’ plans, according to U.S. and Russian officials with knowledge of the private conversations in the Palace Hotel.
And after Kerry consulted others in the Obama administration, he told Lavrov that the truce should last a week, said the officials.
Lavrov, according to one official, threw up his hands in exasperation.
“Originally, our American colleagues said, I believe on Wednesday, why can we not consider at least a threeday period,” Lavrov said at a news conference Friday. “We checked with the military who know the situation on the ground. We accepted. But the next morning they said, ‘Thank you very much, but we now need seven.’”
One senior U.S. official said Lavrov’s account was misleading and that Russia issued several unacceptable conditions of its own. The official said Kerry and Lavrov never even reached a tentative understanding between themselves, let alone their governments.
Regardless of the differing accounts, the fallout from the failure was severe.
By Thursday afternoon, as Kerry and Lavrov met with more than a dozen European and Arab foreign ministers, Russia was helping Syria’s government launch a fresh offensive on the already besieged city of Aleppo. An angry Kerry announced the news to the room after reading it off an aide’s BlackBerry.
He then told reporters the cease-fire was over, even as he said there could be no alternative approach.
Kerry on Friday said he held follow-up consultations with Lavrov and “we exchanged some ideas and we had a little bit of progress.”
“We’re evaluating some mutual ideas in a constructive way,” Kerry said, toning down the outrage he had expressed with Russia’s position a day earlier and in a Wednesday speech at the U.N. Security Council.
The week’s breakdown in the diplomacy on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly occurred as violence in Syria accelerated. Several high-profile and deadly attacks suggested the war could be entering a darker phase.
First, an errant U.S. strike on a Syrian military contingent killed dozens. Twenty died when an aid convoy headed toward Aleppo was bombed — Washington blamed the attack on Moscow; Russia said it wasn’t responsible. Then, four medics were killed in a bombing raid, presumably by Syria or Russia.
But the diplomatic failure also underscored a rapid plunge in U.S.-Russian cooperation on Syria. Just two weeks ago, Kerry and Lavrov culminated a marathon day of negotiations in Geneva with an announcement of a nationwide cease-fire that would be followed by a new military alliance between the former Cold War foes, targeting the Islamic State group and al-Qaida.
Much of the world hailed the outcome and a rare calm followed over war-ravaged parts of Syria for several days. It didn’t last.