MOSCOW - Delivery of long-range anti-aircraft missiles to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces “is a stabilizing factor,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said, even as Israel denounced the decision.
“We won’t cancel this contract,” Ryabkov said Tuesday in Moscow. “We understand the concerns and the signals that are being sent to us from different capitals. We see that many of our partners are worried about this, but we have no reasons to reconsider our position.”
The S-300 missiles with a range of about 186 miles are a threat to Israel and can reach aircraft over Ben Gurion airport, said Yuval Steinitz, Israeli minister of international relations. That makes them “not just defensive weapons, but offensive,” he said, calling the Russian move “terribly wrong.”
The exchanges happened hours after the European Union authorized arms sales to the Syrian opposition. While Britain and France, the prime movers behind the decision, said there would be no immediate shipments to rebels, both countries said the move was intended to narrow the options for Assad, who has clung to power during two years of civil war that have cost 80,000 Syrian lives.
The idea is “to change the perception of Assad that he now has time on his side, with more support from Russia, Iran and Hezbollah,” a senior European diplomat said.
The debate on the issue in Brussels lasted 13 hours, partly to secure a promise that neither Britain nor France would begin to deliver any arms, if they choose to do so, until the beginning of August, to allow the Geneva peace process to get traction, the officials explained.
Ryabkov accused the EU of “pouring oil on the flames of the conflict” and called the EU decision “a reflection of double standards.”
“You cannot declare the wish to stop the bloodshed, on one hand, and continue to pump armaments into Syria, on the other hand,” he said.
A senior European official, when told of the comment, said Russia should “take its own words to heart.”
The Russian minister declined to say what stage the S-300 deliveries have reached, but Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon said the systems have not yet been shipped. “If, by some misfortune, they arrive in Syria, we will know what to do,” he said.
Yaalon spoke at an annual civil-defense drill to prepare for missile attacks on Israel. Israel’s civil defense chief, Home Front Minister Gilad Erdan, said this week’s drill was not specifically connected to the tensions with Syria.
“But of course we must take into consideration that something like that might happen in the near future because of what we see in Syria, and because we know that chemical weapons exist in Syria and might fall to the hands of radical Muslim terror groups,” he said.
The S-300, first deployed by the Soviet Union in the late 1970s, would be “destabilizing” for Israel’s security, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said May 9 in Rome.
“We disagree with, and we condemn, the continued supply of Russian weapons to the regime,” U.S. State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell told reporters Tuesday in Washington. “We’ve been clear throughout and very direct with the Russian government about that.”
At the same time, Ventrell said the U.S. and Russia agree on the goal of reaching a negotiated settlement to the Syrian conflict.
Ruslan Pukhov, head of the Center of Analysis of Strategies and Technologies in Moscow, questioned the military effect of the weapons.
“This is more about politics than real arms supply,” he said by phone. “The S-300 in the Syrian case is an attract fire-to-yourself kind of weapon. Imagine what will happen if they shoot down an Israeli plane? Assad needs more soldiers and light weapons and not anti-aircraft systems.”
Others disagreed with that assessment.
The sale “is a massive game-changer,” Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said in an e-mail. “It virtually ensures that the U.S.-Russian talks will be meaningless, sends warning signals about similar arms transfers to Iran, can drag Israel into the Syrian fighting, and would sharply alter U.S. and allied ‘no fly’ capabilities if the Syrians can quickly absorb the system.”
The EU decision had harmed the prospects ofsuccess for an international peace conference and is a “risky step,” Ryabkov said. Kerry and Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met in Paris on Monday to discuss the conference. The U.S. and Russia are “deeply committed” to making the peace conference work, Kerry said after the meeting.
“The chances for success are there,” Lavrov said. “We will do everything in our power to use those chances to make them realized.”
In Syria, the commander of the main Western-backed umbrella group of rebel brigades said Tuesday that he urgently needs Western anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to prevent further regime gains on the battlefield. The rebels’ weapons are no match for theSyrian regime’s modern tanks and warplanes, he said.
“We are very disappointed,” Gen. Salim Idris, military chief of the Free Syrian Army, said of the EU decision not to send weapons until after the Geneva conference. “Wedon’t have any patience [any] more.”
Syria’s fractured opposition has not yet committed to the Geneva talks. Opposition leaders have said they will participate in talks only if Assad’s departure from power tops the agenda, a demand Assad and Russia have rejected.
In the U.S., Sen. John Mc-Cain on Tuesday praised the “brave fighters” battling Assad’s forces and renewed his call for President Barack Obama’s administration to move aggressively militarily to aid the opposition.
In a series of stops in the Middle East, the Republican lawmaker and former presidential candidate slipped into Syria on Monday for meetings with commanders from the rebel forces and traveled to Yemen on Tuesday to sit down with President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.
“Important visit with brave fighters in #Syria who are risking their lives for freedom and need our help,” McCain, who has been a proponent of military action against Assad, said Tuesday on Twitter.
Meanwhile, gunmen killed three Lebanese soldiers in a drive-by shooting on a government checkpoint near the Syrian border Tuesday, Lebanon’s military said, increasing concerns that the civil war is spreading.
The border shooting took place before dawn Tuesday when gunmen opened fire from a moving car on a checkpoint near the predominantly Sunni town of Arsal, about 7 miles from the Syrian border, the military said in a statement. Government troops have launched a search for the assailants.
The shooting is “part of a series of terrorist and criminal acts that seek to sow civil strife in Lebanon and attack soldiers working hard to prevent that,” Lebanese President Michel Suleiman said.
To the north of Arsal, rockets fired from Syria struck the Lebanese town of Hermel, wounding several people, Lebanese security officials said on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.
Hermel is just across the border from the Syrian town of Qusair, where gunmen from the Lebanese Shiite militant Hezbollah group have been fighting alongside Syrian government troops against rebels defending the strategic town.
Residents blamed jihadi extremists for the rocket fire and said they believed the source was in Arsal. Those firing, they said, were either Syrian rebels or their Lebanese Sunni sympathizers.
Residents said they believed that they were being targeted because Hezbollah is the political power in the village and bases some operations nearby. But Saad Hamedeh, the son of Hermel’s tribal sheik, said there were no military targets in the village.
“They are trying to kill civilians,” he said.
The bloodshed has raised fears that the Syrian violence spilling over into Lebanon will reignite the sectarian bloodshed that devastated the country in its own 15-year civil war that ended in 1990.
Information for this article was contributed by Stepan Kravchenko, Henry Meyer, Indira A.R. Lakshmanan and Calev Ben-David of Bloomberg News; by Steven Erlanger, Anne Barnard, Hania Mourtada and David Jolly of The New York Times; and by Barbara Surk, Karin Laub, Onur Cakir, Albert Aji, Josef Federman, Vladimir Isachenkov, Jamey Keaten, Karin Laub, Metthew Lee, Edith M. Lederer, Donna Cassata, Bradley Klapper and Julie Pace of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 05/29/2013