Russia Calls U.N. Chemical Report on Syria Biased

Narciso Contreras/Associated Press

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MOSCOW — Russia sharply criticized the new United Nations reporton Syria’s chemical arms use on Wednesday as biased and incomplete, hardening the Kremlin’s defense of the Syrian government even while pressing ahead with a plan to disarm its arsenal of the internationally banned weapons.

• The Russians also escalated their critiques of Western governments’ interpretations of the report, which offered the first independent confirmation of a large chemical weapons assault on Aug. 21 on the outskirts of Syria’s capital, Damascus, that asphyxiated hundreds of civilians.

Although the report did not assign blame for that assault to either side in Syria’s civil war, analyses of some of the evidence it presented point directly at elite military forcesloyal to Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. The United States, Britain, France and human rights and nonproliferation groups also say that the report’s detailed annexes on the types of weapons used, the large volume of poison gas they carried, and their trajectories lead to the conclusion that the forces of Mr. Assad were culpable.

The Russian criticism came as the United Nations Security Council’s five permanent members began a second day of talks on a draft resolution aimed at ensuring that the Syrian government honors its commitment to identify and surrender all chemical munitions for destruction, steps it officially agreed to take under a deal negotiated Saturday by Russia and the United States that averted a punitive American missile strike on Syria.

Russian news reports quoted the country’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei A. Ryabkov, as saying during a visit to Damascus that Syria’s government had provided additional information that showed insurgents used chemical weapons not only on Aug. 21 but also on other occasions.

The Syrians offered no such information to the United Nations chemical weapons inspectors before they left Syria with a trove of forensic samples on Aug. 31. The inspectors have said they will return to Syria to investigate other reported instances of chemical weapons use, but no dates have been announced.

Mr. Ryabkov spoke after meeting with Mr. Assad and his foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem. He did not disclose the precise nature of the additional information the Syrians had conveyed to him, but he was blunt about his criticism of the report presented on Monday at the United Nations.

“We are unhappy about this report,” Mr. Ryabkov said in remarks broadcast by the state television network, RT. “We think that the report was distorted. It was one-sided. The basis of information upon which it is built is insufficient.” He also said Russia needed “to learn and know more on what happened beyond and above that incident of Aug. 21.”

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, has also questioned the United Nations report, though not as harshly. Mr. Lavrov, who brokered the deal with Secretary of State John Kerry to put Syria’s chemical weapons under international supervision, said Tuesday that there were still “serious grounds to believe” that the Aug. 21 attack was a provocation carried out by the rebels.

As he has many times, Mr. Assad, in an interview conducted Tuesday and broadcast Wednesday on Fox News, denied that his government was responsible for the attack. “We didn’t use any chemical weapons” outside Damascus, he said.

Mr. Assad also said Syria would comply with the chemical weapons agreement, which he estimated would cost $1 billion and take about a year.

Asked about the Russian criticisms, Martin Nesirky, a spokesman for Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, said it had been clear to everyone that the chemical weapons inspectors were focusing first on the Aug. 21 attack because of its magnitude and were planning to return to Syria to investigate other accusations, with a more comprehensive report to follow.

Mr. Nesirky also took issue with the Russian portrayal of the report as biased. “The findings in that report are indisputable,” he said at a midday briefing. “This was a thoroughly objective report on that specific incident.”

Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius of France, who had just visited with Mr. Lavrov, reacted angrily to the Russian accusations, saying they had surprised him. “Nobody can question the objectivity of the people appointed by the U.N.,” Mr. Fabius was quoted by Agence France-Presse.

Russia, which like the other permanent Security Council members has veto power, is resisting coercive language in the draft offered by the Western members that could lead to military intervention in Syria. The Russian position appeared intended to sow enough doubt to call into question additional pressure on Syria’s government, and perhaps to cloud evidence that at least some of the country’s arsenal was of Soviet origin.