Envoys from Russia and China had signaled this past week that they would recommend their capitals support the U.N. resolution, according to senior council diplomats. But Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, ultimately rejected the compromise draft, proposing a set of last-minute amendments Saturday that were rejected by Washington and other sponsors of the resolution.
“We are not friends or allies of President Assad,” Lavrov insisted ahead of the vote. “We try to stick to our responsibilities as a permanent members of the Security Council, and the Security Council by definition does not engage in domestic affairs of member states.”
Senior administration officials pointed to the wide margin of support for the resolution, with developing countries such as Pakistan, India, South Africa and Azerbaijan all siding against the Assad government. “There was a hopeful aspect” to the vote, Rice said. “More and more countries are united in saying the violence must stop, change must come.”
White House officials acknowledged that the vote was a blow to diplomatic efforts to end the Syrian crisis. The focus now appears to shift to the Arab League, where a vote on sanctions by Arab nations could come later this month.
But critics of the administration’s incremental diplomacy in Syria said the administration was partly to blame for Saturday’s outcome.
“This has been a slow-motion train wreck,” said David Schenker, an adviser to the Pentagon on the Middle East during the George W. Bush administration. “We aimed low, and we fell short.”
Rather than attempting to sell the Russians on a toothless resolution, Schenker said, the White House should be mobilizing a “coalition of the willing” to help Syria’s beleaguered rebels with weapons and training. “If we continue to defer both to the Arab League and the U.N., the Syrian people are doomed.”
Saturday’s vote carried political risks for Moscow and Beijing, which have defied the wishes not only of Washington and its European powers, but confronted a coalition of influential and wealthy states likely to be driven even more deeply into the Western camp.
“There is nothing in this text that should have triggered a veto. We removed every possible excuse,” said Britain’s U.N. envoy, Mark Lyall Grant. “The reality is that Russia and China have today taken a choice: to turn their backs on the Arab world and to support tyranny rather than the legitimate aspirations of the Syrian people.”
In Syria, demonstrators were bracing for another possible onslaught.
Col. Malik Turki, a commander with the armed group known as the Free Syrian Army, said when reached by telephone in Turkey that he had received dozens of calls from Syrians asking him to supply them with weapons after the events of Friday night. He accused the authorities of pushing the country toward civil war and the international community of failing to stop government assaults.
“The Syrian citizens will do anything to get what is needed for their defense as the international community is giving this regime one chance after the other,” he said.
Fordham reported from Damascus. Staff writer Joby Warrick in Washington contributed to this report.
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