Pressure Mounts on Russia To Switch Horses in Syria
Russia won't give up its alliance with Syria, writes Barbara Slavin, but it may be convinced to detach from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. While the Houla massacre didn't horrify Russian President Vladimir Putin as much as the West, it did raise stakes as the clock runs down on UN monitors and Ramadan approaches.
The US, Europe and Arab nations are mounting a concerted effort to convince Russia that it can maintain its alliance with Syria without Bashar al-Assad at the helm.
“There is no chance to detach Russia from Syria,” a senior Western diplomat in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Monday [June 4], referring to Russia’s long alliance with Syria.
“So we try to detach Assad from Russia and convince the Russians that Assad for cold, geopolitical reasons is a bad horse,” the diplomat said. “Our hope is that Russia has made the decision that Assad is a bad horse, that Assad is now a liability in the Russia-Syria strategic alliance.”
This line of argument has been strengthened in the aftermath of the massacre last month [May 25] of more than 100 people, many of them children, in the village of Houla, but it is not yet clear whether Russia is convinced.
