MOSCOW : Russia sought to distance itself on Wednesday from American accusations that it was responsible for the fiery destruction of a humanitarian convoy in Syria, with the foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, also seeking to absolve Syria of responsibility for the attack.
The charges and countercharges divided opinion in Russia, with some accusing the Syrian government and others blaming the United States. If there was any consensus, it was that the destruction of the much-needed aid convoy bound for rebel-held parts of Aleppo Province on Monday dealt a serious blow to already beleaguered attempts by the United States and Russian to find a way to work together on Syria.
Mr. Lavrov, noting that the Russian Air Force had already announced that it had not hit the convoy, said the Syrians were not able to fly at night. “The Syrian Air Force could not have been at work, because the convoy was attacked during the hours of darkness,” Mr. Lavrov said from the United Nations General Assembly session in New York, speaking to Russia’s state-run Rossiya 1 television.
Russia has also said that its yearlong campaign of airstrikes in Syria has not caused a single civilian casualty, though the monitoring group airwars.org says it conservatively estimates the number at 3,000. Mr. Lavrov, in the excerpt from a longer interview broadcast by Rossiya 1, did not elaborate on who might have carried out the attack.
Much of the convoy, carrying aid from government-controlled territory for 78,000 people in rebel-held territory in the western countryside of Aleppo Province, went up in flames. The International Committee of the Red Cross said in a statement that “around 20 civilians” had been killed, including Omar Barakat, the local director of the Syria Red Crescent Society.
Not everyone accepted the idea of absolving the Syrian government. The Novaya Gazeta newspaper, one of the few independent voices left in the Russian news media, blamed Damascus. Alexander Shumilin, a political scientist, wrote in the newspaper that Syria had “barbarously bombed” the convoy, probably dealing a death knell to diplomacy. “That means the escalation of the conflict,” he wrote.
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But much of the reaction in Russia blamed the United States. Numerous analysts found it suspicious that Washington had accused Russia of the attack so soon after the American military apologized for an airstrike that killed dozens of Syrian soldiers during last week’s cease-fire that had been negotiated by Mr. Lavrov and Secretary of State John Kerry.
“It seems that such ill-conceived accusations that are not supported by facts are, among other things, designed to deflect attention away from a very strange ‘mistake’ made by pilots of an anti-Islamic State coalition headed by the United States,” said Roman Kudrin, a reporter commenting on state-backed Channel ne.
