Russia’s Duma to pass statement on Syria at forthcoming session

Russia’s State Duma is going to adopt a statement on Syria at one of the plenary meetings shortly after the start of the autumn session, which begins September 10, the house Speaker, Sergei Naryshkin told reporters Monday. “Undoubtedly, we hope to get a reaction from our US counterparts,” he said, adding that the Russian MPs had offered US congressmen and Senators to hold a direct dialogue for discussing the crisis and had formed a special delegation for a visit to Washington for this discussion. “Unfortunately, our American partners evaded that dialogue and we regard this as a weakness of the US Congress positions on the issue,” Naryshkin said. “I don’t rule out they themselves have a faint trust or no trust at all in the assertions of the U.S. Administration that chemical weapons were used in Syria by government forces.” “Quite possibly, the Congressmen and Senators still remember the notorious test tube and everything related to it as a forged pretext for intervention in Iraq,” he said. Naryshkin admitted that the situation in Syria remains highly complicated. “If military force is used from the outside, it will inflict a very serious damage on the UN and the entire system of global security,” he said. Naryshkin recalled that the number of countries, which had spoken against military intervention in Syria at the G20 summit in St. Petersburg a few days ago, was much bigger that the number of the advocates of intervention.