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Russian Foreign Ministry on Sunday urged all outside powers involved in the Syrian crisis to exercise restraints and give up potential armed intervention.
"Serious attention has been paid in Moscow to a statement by U. S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel about measures, ordered by President Barack Obama, to make American armed forces ready for armed action against Syria at any moment," said ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich in a statement.
Similar approaches had also been heard from "Paris, London and some other capitals ... with complete disregard for a multitude of acts suggesting that the alleged use by Syrian armed forces of chemical weapons in Eastern Ghouta on August 21 was a provocation on the part of the irreconcilable opposition," he said.
The Syrian opposition claimed that President Bashar al-Assad's forces killed as many as 1,300 people in the chemical weapons attack in the suburbs of Damascus, the Syrian capital, Wednesday, an allegation denied by the Syrian government.
Moscow believed that the current fuss about the alleged use of chemical weapons "clearly aims to interfere with the work of UN independent chemical weapon experts that has begun successfully."
The diplomat also said it was "reminiscent of events of 10 years ago in which, using false information that the Iraqis possessed weapons of mass destruction as a pretext and bypassing the United Nations, the United States launched a reckless enterprise with consequences that everyone is well aware of."
He warned that any unilateral armed action that bypassed the UN would "undermine international efforts to find a political and diplomatic solution to the Syrian conflict ... and have an extremely destructive effect on what already is an explosive situation in the Middle East."
