... sanctions. The alternative is smuggling and semi-legal schemes, which increase costs several times over, and are fraught with the danger of criminal prosecution.
Other countries face a similar situation. The first COVID-19 cases have been registered in Syria, a country that is in a state of war. The strict oil embargo has resulted in a shortage of petrol, which is needed by both the military and medics. Cuba has faced fuel shortages as a result of a U.S.-led embargo for years now. Venezuela and a number ...
... suspended the ceasefire talks. Is it because the US and Russia cannot agree on what is Al-Nusra?
I wouldn’t put it that way. Al-Nusra (or whatever it may call itself now) is a terrorist organisation recognised as such by the UN Security Council (UNSC). Russia and the United States, for all the difficulties and complications over the multi-sided conflict in Syria, have been able to agree on a lot of things. And they came up with a number of joint documents which they signed.
For some reason the US was quite hesitant, to put it mildly, to make them public, and to seek the endorsement, as we proposed, of the ...
... (UNSC) draft resolution on the inclusion of Kurds in the intra-Syrian peace talks in Geneva was destructive for the conflict resolution, a Russian senator said on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, the draft document designed to ensure representative nature of Syria peace talks was blocked by the Western UNSC members.
"From the point of view of common sense and the interests of the process it was a destructive, ill-timed and certainly pointless move by Westerners, made apparently solely on the basis of the initiative's source: just because it came ...