MESOP “PUTIN THE PERFECT WAR CRIMINAL” : Russia Accused of War Crimes as Another 85 Killed in Aleppo
By Scott Lucas – eawolrdview – 26 Sept Russia has been accused of war crimes in the UN Security Council, as another 92 people were killed amid Russian-regime bombing of Syria’s largest city Aleppo on Sunday. The Local Coordination Committees documented the deaths, which included dozens of children and women. Since Thursday, the resurgent bombing has killed about 350 people in and near Aleppo. Russia and the Assad regime renewed the attacks as soon as the Syrian military declared an end to a brief US-Russian ceasefire on Monday, beginning with an assault on a UN aid convoy west of Aleppo. In an emergency UN Security Council session on the bombing and siege, the US, British, and French Ambassadors all pointed at Russia’s use of bunker-busting and incendiary bombs
US Ambassador Samantha Power said: What Russia is sponsoring and doing is not counter-terrorism. It is barbarism.
History will not look kindly on security council members who stay silent in the face of this carnage.
Power said while Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov talked about restoring peace in Syria at Council meetings last week, incendiary bombs were being loaded onto Moscow’s warplanes.
She highlighted the targeting of three out of four White Helmets rescue centers in eastern Aleppo city: “Those buried in rubble in Aleppo are much more likely to die in the rubble”.
UK Ambassador Matthew Rycroft reinforced the line:
Bunker-busting bombs, more suited to destroying military installations, are now destroying homes, decimating bomb shelters, crippling, maiming, killing dozens, if not hundreds. “Incendiary munitions, indiscriminate in their reach, are being dropped on to civilian areas so that, yet again, Aleppo is burning. And to cap it all, water supplies, so vital to millions, are now being targeted, depriving water to those most in need.
In short, it is difficult to deny that Russia is partnering with the Syrian regime to carry out war crimes.
French Ambassador François Delattre compared the assault to the Serbian attacks on the civilians of Srebrnica in 1994 and the German bombing of the Spanish city of Guernica in 1937: “These crimes must not go unpunished”.
He said that if nothing was done to stop the assault, “this week will go down in history as the one in which diplomacy failed and barbarism triumphed”.
Russia: Civilian Deaths Are Fake
Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin tried to shift the blame to rebels, insisting that they were stopping civilians from leaving and using them as human shields.
He praised the Assad regime for its “admirable restraint”: “The Syrian regime only uses air power to get terrorists out of the city with minimal civilian casualties.”
Churkin said the footage of civilian deaths in eastern Aleppo was fake, using image from regime-held western Aleppo.
However, Churkin’s statement was undermined by UN envoy Staffan de Mistura, who said the ceasefire was broken “when five [opposition] districts were hit reportedly with five severe airstrikes”:
Since that fateful day, we have seen the situation in eastern Aleppo deteriorate to new heights of horror….
We heard the word “unprecedented” – in quantity and also in scale and type – in [descriptions of] the types of bombing. We have seen reports, videos and pictures of reported use of incendiary bombs that create fireballs of such intensity that they light up the pitch darkness in eastern Aleppo, as though it was actually daylight. We now hear of bunker-busting bombs being used and see pictures of large craters in the earth much larger than in previous aerial bombings.
The Assad regime’s ambassador, Bashar al-Ja’afari tried another tactic, declaring that rebels will stage chemical attacks and blame them on the regime. He said the rebels would do this by disguising themselves in Syrian Army uniforms.