Russia Monday condemned as hysterical the angry Western reaction to its veto of a UN resolution condemning Syria’s crackdown on protestors, as its top diplomat prepared for a mission to Damascus.
After blocking the resolution on Saturday with its Security Council ally China, Moscow has been painted in Western capitals as the diplomatic villain of the crisis and even told by a French minister it needed a “kick in the ass”. But Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov expressed frustration that the West did not postpone the vote until after his trip Tuesday to Damascus, a still mysterious visit where he will deliver a message to President Bashar al-Assad. “Some comments from the West on the UN Security Council vote, I would say, are indecent and bordering on hysteria,” Lavrov told reporters in Moscow after a meeting with Bahraini counterpart Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa.
“Such hysterical comments are aimed at suppressing what is actually happening and what has happened,” said Lavrov. “It reminds me of the proverb: ‘he who gets angry is rarely right’,” he added. Lavrov reaffirmed Russia’s position that the resolution was wrong to blame Assad’s regime alone for the violence and said the text should have also taken aim at the opposition. “In Syria there is more than one source of violence. There are several there,” he said. Russian news agency ITAR-TASS said that Lavrov, accompanied by the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Agency (SVR) Mikhail Fradkov, would deliver a message from President Dmitry Medvedev to Assad on Tuesday. But Lavrov would not divulge the purpose of the mission. “When you go on a mission on the order of the head of state then the purpose of the mission is usually only revealed to the person it is addressed to. If I tell you everything now, then what is the point?” “You can talk to people just through the media. And some countries prefer to do things this way. But foreign policy demands a more classical approach.” Lavrov regretted that Western powers had not postponed the vote, saying that Moscow had asked for a delay of a few days so that the outcome of his visit to Syria could be discussed.