UNITED NATIONS, January 9. /TASS/. The West is deliberately seeking to worsen the humanitarian situation in Syria by imposing sanctions, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzya said on Monday.
"The Western delegations detail, including today, their efforts to deliver humanitarian assistance to Syria, but are evading another uncomfortable topic - their criminal unilateral sanctions, which are hitting ordinary Syrians," Nebenzya said at a meeting of the UN Security Council after it unanimously passed a resolution extending the cross-border aid mechanism in Syria until July 10.
"These sanctions are a key factor in the degradation of the humanitarian situation in Syria. As a matter of fact, Western countries are deliberately worsening it in a bid to contain the process of the normalization of the situation in the country and discredit the actions of its legitimate government," he said.
According to the Russian diplomat, the West is deliberately "creating artificial barriers for the return of Syrian refugees from neighboring countries fearing that the Syrian government will receive political dividends in case of the mass return of Syrians." "We are convinced that such dirty political games around Syria must be stopped. This is not merely our position, this is the will of the Syrian people," he stressed.
"In other words, we want humanitarian aid to be delivered to all Syrians, without double standards and discrimination. And we want it to be done honestly, without politicization and parallel unilateral measures, which reduce any humanitarian assistance to zero," Nebenzya said. "I hope that we will be able to resolve this simple and obvious problem by July. We call on our colleagues not to waste time and drop the mantra that the cross-border aid mechanism has no alternatives, which stems only from their unwillingness to abandon this mechanism.".