Russia has made clear it felt betrayed after tacitly supporting a UN resolution allowing outside military intervention in Libya earlier this year, but may find it hard to block a fresh Europe-led effort to get UN Security Council condemnation of the recent bloodshed in Syria.
During his recent news conference with hundreds of journalists, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said that although Russia allowed a UN resolution condemning violence in Libya to pass, "subsequent developments have shown that such resolutions can be easily manipulated," pointing to controversial bombings of Libya by NATO forces.
"It would be very dangerous and short-sighted for Russia to find itself in the role of a lackey to Europe and the United States again," says Vladimir Karyakin, a leading Middle East expert from the state Institute for Strategic Research.
But other experts say that while the Libyan situation has unfolded very differently from what Russia expected, Moscow today has little to lose by throwing its weight behind a new UN resolution, which pointedly does not call for any use of force, given the recent violence in Syria.
"As far as I understand, the proposed draft resolution does not call for military intervention in Syria, and it's not clear at all why Russia is against it," Konstantin von Eggert, a political commentator for Kommersant FM radio station, told RIA Novosti.
"I do not understand why Russia is afraid to condemn what seems to be disproportionate violence deployed against civilians in Syria," he said. Since Moscow "did condemn the same thing in Libya, this inconsistency looks quite strange," he said.
Syria has been embroiled in violent unrest for the past two and half months, with more than 1,000 people killed in clashes between protesters demanding the end of President Bashar al-Assad's authoritarian rule and his supporters. As government troops have cracked down on demonstrators across the country, up to 120 Syrian police and security officers were reported to have been killed by protesters over the past few days.
Russia urges diplomatic solution
Four European countries (France, Britain, Germany and Portugal) have announced their plans to submit a draft resolution condemning the Syrian violence to the UN Security Council in the near future, possibly by Friday.
The proposed resolution condemns the repression of protesters and "calls for the Syrian government to meet their people's legitimate demands, release all prisoners of conscience, lift restrictions on the media and internet and cooperate with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights," British Foreign Secretary William Hague told the House of Commons on Tuesday.
During the G8 summit in Deauville last month, Medvedev told his western colleagues that Russia, a UN Security Council permanent member, would oppose any force against Syria and urged a diplomatic solution to the crisis.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reiterated the stance on Tuesday, saying that the international community should step up its diplomatic efforts to settle the situation in Syria rather than "create circumstances for new armed conflicts."
London is "working to persuade other countries that the Security Council has a responsibility to speak out," the British foreign secretary said on Tuesday. China, which also holds a permanent seat in the Security Council along with Russia, has also opposed the use of force against Assad.
"The Syrian regime will not be able to regain as much legitimacy and as much control as it had before these events," Russian expert von Eggert says, adding that if Russia refuses to condemn Assad, it may eventually "find itself on the wrong side of history."
"The Syrian regime is much more dangerous for stability in the Middle East than the Libyan regime has ever been because Damascus is enjoying direct support from Iran, being a kind of Iranian Trojan Horse in the Arab region," he said.
But analyst Karyakin insists that Russia should refrain from backing Syrian rebels.
"I don't understand why the West has taken on Syria that insistently while they haven't yet finished their wars in Afghanistan and Libya," he says. "You cannot compare hooligans to peaceful demonstrators in order to topple a regime that the West doesn't like."
He said he believed Russia would not support the proposed resolution and "try to stand aside and take the tested position of mediator when the situation comes to a deadlock."
MOSCOW, June 8 (RIA Novosti, Maria Kuchma)
