Checkmate!
Russia’s Vladimir Putin muscled into the Syria crisis and showed up President Obama with an 11th-hour peace plan that was first suggested as a joke by the top US diplomat.
The Putin proposal — that the Syrians turn over their chemical weapons and the United States call off airstrikes — staved off a looming war between the countries and saved Obama from crumbling public and congressional support for an attack.
The Russian president also put Secretary of State John Kerry’s money where his mouth is — brokering peace with the same terms that Kerry sarcastically demanded at a press conference Monday.
As that proposal gained steam, the White House tried to take credit for the compromise by claiming that Obama and Putin secretly discussed the idea last week.
Putin, who was the one pulling strings yesterday rather than the sidelined Obama, demanded that the United States and its allies agree not to strike Syria in exchange for the weapons handover.
“You can’t really ask Syria, or any other country, to disarm unilaterally while military action against it is being contemplated,” Putin said.
But experts questioned how Syria’s chemical stockpile could be placed under the control of international monitors in the middle of a bloody civil war that has claimed more than 100,000 lives.
Putin’s plan allowed him to take the moral high ground in what was becoming a bitter verbal battle with Washington.
“Russia’s position . . . is well known: We are against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction of any kind — chemical and nuclear weapons,” Putin said.
It was unclear if the Russian plan would be approved by the UN Security Council. Putin made clear that Russia would reject any resolution that blames the Syrian government for the Aug. 21 poison-gas attack that killed more than 1,400 of its people, including many children.
A meeting of the council was scheduled for late Tuesday, but was canceled amid furious diplomatic efforts to reach compromise language.
Syrian rebel leaders said the plan did nothing to address the war itself and would still allow Bashar al-Assad to attack them and the civilian population.
Syria had never even acknowledged its possession of poison gas until Tuesday.
“Our commitment to the Russian initiative has the goal of ending our possession of chemical arms,” Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem said, according to Russia’s Interfax news agency. “We are ready to declare the location of the chemical weapons, stop production of the chemical weapons, and show these [production] facilities to representatives of Russia and other United Nations member states.”
France is pushing a UN Security Council resolution, but is running into a Putin roadblock.
“As I understood, the Russians at this stage were not necessarily enthusiastic, and I’m using euphemism, to put all that into the framework of a UN binding resolution,” Socialist pol Laurent Fabius told French lawmakers after a phone conversation with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Fabius said the French resolution would demand that Syria open its chemical-weapons program to inspection, place it under international control and ultimately dismantle it. A violation of that commitment, he said, would carry “very serious consequences.”
Fabius expressed caution that French authorities “don’t want to fall into a trap” that could allow the Assad regime to skirt accountability or buy time.
Damascus denies its forces were behind the Aug. 21 attack, but a New York-based human-rights group said that evidence “strongly suggests” Syrian government forces fired rockets with warheads packed with nerve gas — most likely sarin — into a Damascus suburb.
Victims of the attack had symptoms that “provide telltale evidence about the weapon systems used,” said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director for the group, Human Rights Watch.