From Russia, with blood? Russia is helping Iran break UN rules on arms shipments. Moscow. Illustrative. Photo Courtesy of UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras
Iran is under an arms embargo imposed by the United Nations Security Council, but that isn’t stopping Russia from helping Iran skirt those rules to back the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad in that nation’s civil war. Fox News cited western intelligence sources as saying in Thursday that Russian cargo planes have been flying the arms into Syria twice a day for the last ten days.
The exclusive Fox News report said the arrangement is known in the highest levels of Russia’s government, including by President Vladimir Putin. The repeated violations come just months after Russia signed the nuclear deal with Iran that explicitly extended the arms embargo another five years. That embargo extension was proudly touted by the US at the time.
Back in mid-July, US Secretary of State John Kerry pointed to the embargo as a win for the US administration, saying three of the seven nations negotiating wanted to nix the embargo.
“The result of the negotiation is that [the arms embargo] not only continues for five full years, which is a pretty lengthy period of time during which a lot of other things can begin to happen, but it… is fully enforceable and has the force of the United Nations Security Council,” said Kerry in comments released by the State Department back in July.
“Now, to have achieved that when three of the nations could have said no deal and walked away or you could have had a different outcome I think is significant.”
Based on almost two dozen Russian cargo flights, it looks like two of those seven nations—Iran and Russia—are acting as though the embargo has been lifted whether they agreed to it or not.
(By Joshua Spurlock, www.themideastupdate.com, October 29, 2015)