What last week was just a not-so-thinly-veiled-threat lobbed by John Kerry to the Kremlin has, now that Russia suspended its participation in a Plutonium cleanup accord with the US, become official, and as the State Department announced moments ago, the US has now suspended bilateral discussions, i.e. diplomatic relations, with Russia over Syria, escalating the conflict in the war-torn nation to a level last seen in late 2015.
“This is not a decision that was taken lightly,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said, cited by AFP, accusing Russia and its Syrian ally of stepping up attacks on civilian areas. Kirby said the Russian and US militaries will continue to use a communications channel set up to ensure their forces do not get in each others’ way during “counterterrorism operations in Syria.”
Kirby’s full statement is below:
The United States is calling home personnel who had been sent to Geneva in order to set-up a “Joint Implementation Center” with Russian officers to plan coordinated strikes.
And US diplomats will suspend discussions with Russia on reviving a September 9 deal reached between US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Under that protocol, a truce came into effect on September 12 but it collapsed within a week amid bitter recriminations and a surge of fighting in the five-year-old civil war.
Washington has accused Moscow of failing to rein in President Bashar al-Assad’s government forces and abetting his…