US suspends Syria talks with Russia

The US said on Monday it was suspending negotiations with Russia over a ceasefire agreement for Syria, a final recognition that the peace plan announced three weeks ago has collapsed.

The state department said Russia was either “unwilling or unable” to get the Syrian regime to adhere to the deal and had instead decided to intensify military action against the opposition.

The US announcement comes as Syrian regime forces advanced on Sunday into areas of Aleppo city held by the rebels following several days of intense bombing.

It also follows Russia’s decision on Monday to scrap an agreement with the US to dispose of weapons-grade plutonium, another sign of deteriorating relations between Moscow and the west.

A US official said there had been “robust discussions” with Russia about Syria that had continued throughout the weekend but that Moscow had made it clear it would not halt the air strikes it had been conducting.

The Interfax news agency quoted an unnamed senior person in Russia’s foreign ministry who said the US decision was “disappointing”.

The talks with Russia about a ceasefire in Syria were in effect the Obama administration’s last attempt to restart a peace process during its remaining four months in office.

The US had offered to co-operate with Russia on air strikes against jihadi groups in Syria, something Moscow had long been pushing for, in return for Russia getting the Assad regime to halt operations in several contested areas of the country.

Within days of being announced, however, the ceasefire came under threat, first when US aircraft attacked Syrian forces in the east of the country — an incident the Pentagon said was a mistake — and then when Russian and Syrian planes bombed Aleppo, including a strike on an aid convoy.

The collapse of the ceasefire has been accompanied by cold war-style recriminations between Washington and Moscow.

Samantha Power, US ambassador to the UN, accused Russia of “barbarism” and war crimes in Syria, while Russia has said that the Pentagon worked to undermine the agreement negotiated by John Kerry, US secretary of state.

While Mr Kerry tried to keep the talks going in the face of rising violence in Aleppo and elsewhere, he made little progress with Moscow and was mocked by some at home.

When he threatened to pull out of the negotiations last week, Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham responded: “No more lakeside tête-à-têtes at five-star hotels in Geneva. No more joint press conferences in Moscow. We can only imagine that having heard the news, Vladimir Putin has called off his bear hunt and is rushing back to the Kremlin to call off Russian air strikes on hospitals, schools, and humanitarian aid convoys around Aleppo.”

The formal collapse of the ceasefire agreement will probably prompt a new wave of discussion within the Obama administration about stepping up its support of the anti-Assad opposition, which risks being eventually overrun in Aleppo.

However, the White House has consistently pushed back against most of the ideas that have been presented about expanding US engagement in the Syrian conflict, especially proposals that involve more direct confrontation with the Assad regime or the Russians.

Konstantin Kosachev, head of the foreign affairs committee in Russia’s upper house of parliament, told reporters the US was moving towards the use of force because of “subjective reasons linked to the electoral campaign”.

He added: “The hawks, evidently, did not support the political process that Lavrov and Kerry agreed on in principle and don’t plan on supporting it. And so the process is doomed as things stand.”

Explaining his announcement on Monday to pull out of the plutonium agreement, MrPutin wrote in a decree that the decision reflected “the emergence of a threat to strategic stability and as a result of unfriendly actions by the United States of America against the Russian Federation”.

Although technical disputes had clouded the agreement for several years, Mr Putin explicitly tied the withdrawal to Russia’s chilly relationship with the US, which began when he returned to the Kremlin in 2012 as president after a four-year stint as prime minister. The relationship hit lows unseen since the cold war after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

The Kremlin said it would restore the treaty if the US reduced the size of Nato forces in eastern Europe, ended sanctions against Russia over the Ukrainian conflict and cancelled the Magnitsky Act, which angered the Kremlin by targeting officials implicated in a $230m tax fraud. The bill also demands that the US compensate Russia for losses incurred as a result of the sanctions.

“This is another nail in the coffin,” said James Acton, co-director of the nuclear policy programme at the Carnegie Endowment. “There are very few areas of US-Russia co-operation left and few that Russia could cancel in an act of spite, so it’s one of the few ways Russia has of inflicting mild pain.”

Bill Browder, the London-based financier who lobbied for the Magnitsky Act, tweeted: “[The] Magnitsky case is the ‘canary in the coal mine’. Putin will use [the] nuclear card to openly extort the west in all areas as his influence wanes.”

Mr Putin agreed the plutonium deal with President Bill Clinton in 2000, during an overture to the west when he first became president. It came into force 10 years later when Sergei Lavrov, foreign minister, and US secretary of state Hillary Clinton signed it during the Obama administration’s attempt to “reset” relations with Russia.

Under the deal, Russia and the US were each to dispose of 34 tons of plutonium from their stockpiles — enough, Mrs Clinton said, to make 17,000 nuclear warheads — by turning it into fuel for nuclear power plants.

The decree reaffirms Russia’s commitment to disposing of the plutonium but means it will do so without the international monitoring provided for in the treaty.

The collapse of the plutonium treaty is the latest of several fissures in US-Russia nuclear diplomacy since Mr Putin returned to the presidency.

The Pentagon said on Monday night that an al-Qaeda leader had been the target of an air strike near Idlib, in north-western Syria. Peter Cook, Pentagon spokesman, said the US was still investigating whether the air strike had killed Abu al-Farai al-Masri, whom he described as one of the senior leaders of al-Qaeda in Syria who had longstanding ties with Osama bin Laden.

Ft.com