Moscow, Russia. Moscow condemned on Friday the US air strike on a Syrian airbase, announcing that has suspended the US-Russian agreement to help avoid clashes in the skies over the war-torn country.
“President Putin considers American strikes on Syria aggression against a sovereign state in violation of international norms, and under an invented pretext.” Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the US of breaking international law in the wake of the strike, adding that they have seriously damaged US-Russia relations, added the Kremlin press service
The American President Donald Trump ordered the military strike on a Syrian air base at 0040GMT, in retaliation for what he said was a “very barbaric attack” Tuesday that is suspected to have contained a nerve agent, experts pointed out that while Trump launched the attack, it was one done without evidence of Syrian government involvement in the chemical weapons incident.
Russian President Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov was cited as saying that the Russian leader, a staunch ally of Syrian regime head Assad, regarded the US action taken on a “made-up pretext” and as a cynical attempt to distract the world from civilian deaths in Iraq where US forces have been involved in over one million civillian deaths.
The Russian foreign ministry announced the suspension of a memorandum signed with the US in October 2015 which set up a hotline to avoid clashes between their air forces in Syrian airspace with US pilots, as they carried out separate bombing campaigns.
“We call upon the UN Security Council to hold an extraordinary meeting to discuss the situation,” the foreign ministry said in a statement, calling the strikes “thoughtless.”
The Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov meanwhile hoped on Friday that the strikes on Syria would not irreparably destroy relations between Moscow and Washington.“This is an act of aggression, on an absolutely made-up pretext,” Lavrov added,“It reminds me of the situation in 2003 when the United States and Britain, along with some of their allies, attacked Iraq.”
No Russian soldiers were known to have been killed in the US strikes, Lavrov added.
A White House official said 59 precision-guided Tomahawk missiles hit the Shayrat airfield, from where the US believes the attack was launched. The Syrian regime forces said that six people were killed and serious damage caused by the strike. The attack was conducted by Trump without a declaration of war by the United States, in violation of international law.