European leaders tried Friday to convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to support a harder course against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. But while German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Fancois Hollande said after meeting separately with the Russian leader that they had all agreed to seek a political solution to the more-than-one-year deadly conflict, the Russian leader showed no sign of budging.
In Berlin, Putin denied charges, made recently by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, that Russian arms shipments were being used against Syrian opposition forces and made clear he opposed to an arms embargo on Damascus. "As far as the arms deliveries are concerned, Russia is not supplying any weapons that could be deployed in civil conflict," Putin insisted.
Russia has consistently supported the al-Assad regime, and in Paris answered moralistic charges by western countries that Moscow was fuelling the conflict with its support. "Assad has visited Paris more often than he has visited Moscow," Putin charged. Hollande parried, indicating that such visits were the doing of his conservative predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy: "I do not accept any responsibility for that." Moscow is a close ally of Damascus and al-Assad, and has resisted all efforts in the UN Security Council and in the international arena to pursue harder action against al-Assad. Hollande has not excluded French support for a military initiative under UN mandate.
But Putin, in his meetings with Merkel, rejected an escalation of UN action. More than 10,000 Syrians have died since March 2011 in the conflict, according to UN accounting. Last weekend's massacre of more than 100 people in Houla, Syria, almost half of them children, has increased pressure on Russia to change its stance. The US has warned that Russian arms shipments and Iran's deployment of soldiers into Syria have raised the likelihood of not only sectarian civil war but also a proxy war with Iran. Putin stopped first in Berlin, and then in Paris.