The West, led by the US and France, is seeking to up the pressure on key Syria ally Russia to stop sending weapons they say Bashar al-Assad’s regime is using in its bloody crackdown on rebels.
After a 15-month uprising in which observers say at least 14,000 people have been killed, the West has taken aim at Moscow, and in particular its state arms exporter Rosoboronexport.
The French foreign ministry yesterday called for a “complete halt” of arms exports to Syria, in a veiled charge against Russia, which last year sold almost $1 billion of weapons to Syria, according to campaign group Avaaz.
“We are calling for a complete halt to arms exports to the Syrian regime as asked by joint UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan before the Security Council last week,” foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said. Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius added: “Our intelligence, direct and indirect, shows that there are deliveries.”
The appeal came hours after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday accused Russia of recently sending a shipment of attack helicopters to Syria.
“They have from time to time said that we shouldn’t worry, that everything they’re shipping is unrelated to their actions internally. That’s patently untrue,” Mrs Clinton said.
“We are concerned about the latest information we have that there are attack helicopters on the way from Russia to Syria, which will escalate the conflict quite dramatically,” Mrs Clinton added.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute says that Russia supplied Syria with 78 per cent of its weapons between 2007 and 2011. But Russia has argued that it was only supplying Syria with weapons that could not be used against civilians .
An unnamed spokesman for Rosoboronexport declined to comment on the reported sale of attack helicopters to Syria but later yesterday Russia denied that Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had accused Washington of arming Syrian rebels, saying his comments during a visit to Iran had been misquoted.
'It was a translation error in Farsi,' a foreign ministry official said, handing out a Russian version of the comments which had Mr Lavrov saying that the UN was delivering arms 'in the region'.