GENEVA, June 27. /TASS/. Russia has no official agreements with the UN regarding the protection of civilian facilities in Syria, but honors all its international humanitarian law obligations in the country, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Geneva Office and other Geneva-based international organizations Gennady Gatilov told TASS on Friday.
The Russian diplomat described as ‘incorrect’ a recent Reuters article, which said that Moscow withdrew from a UN arrangement aimed to protect hospitals and humanitarian aid deliveries in Syria from being hit by the warring parties.
Commenting on the report, Gatilov said: "I would like to stress once again that the way the information was presented by Reuters is incorrect, because there is no system to protect medical facilities in Syria."
"There is - or, rather, there was - a so-called informal mechanism of notification, the so-called deconfliction, which is administered by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs [UN OCHA]," Gatilov said. "I would like to stress that it is an informal, non-binding mechanism of data exchange, which, in fact, was a unilateral initiative of the above-mentioned UN office, OCHA. There are no official documents, no signed agreements, regarding any system of protecting medical facilities in Syria."
"At some point, we attempted to have a collaborative relationship with OCHA in this regard, on their initiative, but we accumulated negative experience of cooperation with UN officials in this domain," he said.
According to the Russian diplomat, the information that Russia used to receive from OCHA "was constantly marred by mistakes and inconsistencies, which, however, is no surprise, because the UN has no presence in Idlib, for example, where most of coordinates mentioned in UN lists were located."
"This information was not coordinated with the Russian military. At the same time, we were constantly accused of striking the facilities that were allegedly deconflicted," Gatilov said.
"The Russian Defense Ministry was verifying the information that came from the UN. But in the majority of cases it turned out that facilities marked as destroyed, were, in fact, untouched. In other words, the coordinates were wrong. Moreover, those facilities had no relation to medical facilities or some other types of civilian objects," Gatilov continued.
"Regretfully, our refutations, which we were sending to the UN on a regular basis - were left unnoticed. Instead, they went ahead with their politicized criticism, which we will no longer tolerate," he said.
According to Gatilov, Russian diplomats "have repeatedly informed UN partners, including from OCHA, that all issues related to humanitarian deconflicting must be solved directly with the government of Syria, which is a UN member state."
"We keep calling upon UN humanitarian officials to engage in an open and constructive cooperation with the government of Syria," he said.
"All activities of the Russian Aerospace Forces, which are present in Syria on an invitation from the Syrian government, are being carried out in strict compliance with the norms of the international humanitarian law," the Russian diplomat went on. "All Russia’s efforts in that regard are aimed only at terrorist groups - the ones which had officially been prohibited by relevant UN Security Council documents. We, on our part, comply with all our obligations on humanitarian law, and this stance remains unchanged."
On Thursday, Reuters reported that Russia "has quit a United Nations arrangement that aimed to protect hospitals and humanitarian aid deliveries in Syria from being hit by the warring parties." The report cited a note from OCHA as saying that "on Tuesday, 23 June, the Russian Federation informed the United Nations that it would no longer participate in the humanitarian notification system.".