While an international noose is tightening around the neck of Bashar-al Assad's regime in Syria, with Turkey this week doing most of the pulling, one country, other than Iran, is intent on bucking the trend – Russia.
A day after the UN human rights council said that Syrian forces were committing crimes against humanity, and Turkey was considering imposing a buffer zone along its border to protect Syrians, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said further attempts should be made to engage with Damascus.
Lavrov opposed the idea of an arms embargo, saying it was unfair to expect the Syrian government not respond to unrest. He thought that for the most part armed opposition groups were provoking the Syrian authorities. These were not empty words.
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