WASHINGTON — When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton accused Russia on Tuesday of shipping attack helicopters to Syria that would “escalate the conflict quite dramatically,” it was the Obama administration’s sharpest criticism yet of Russia’s support for the Syrian government.
What Mrs. Clinton did not say, however, was whether the aircraft were new shipments or, as administration officials say is more likely, helicopters that Syria had sent to Russia a few months ago for routine repairs and refurbishing, and which were now about to be returned.
“She put a little spin on it to put the Russians in a difficult position,” said one senior Defense Department official.
Mrs. Clinton’s claim about the helicopters, administration officials said, is part of a calculated effort to raise the pressure on Russia to abandon President Bashar al-Assad, its main ally in the Middle East. Russia has so far stuck by Mr. Assad’s government, worried that if he were ousted, Moscow would lose its influence in the region.
In response to Mrs. Clinton’s allegations, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, accused the United States of hypocrisy on Wednesday, saying it had supplied weapons that could be used against demonstrators in other countries in the region. Mr. Lavrov, during a visit to Iran, repeated Russia’s claim that it is not supplying Damascus with any weapons that could be used in a civil war.
“We are not providing Syria or any other place with things which can be used in struggle with peaceful demonstrators, unlike the United States, which regularly supplies such equipment to this region,” Mr. Lavrov said. He singled out a recent delivery to “one of the Persian Gulf states” — perhaps a reference to Bahrain. “But for some reason the Americans consider this completely normal.”
Syria has long been a staunch Russian ally and is home to Russia’s only naval base on the Mediterranean Sea. But American officials have warned the Russians that Mr. Assad’s exit is inevitable, and that if Russia wants to preserve its influence in Syria, it needs to be part of the effort to arrange a political transition. If Russia is viewed as complicit in the Assad government’s attack on its own people, these officials said, it would be shunned by any new Syrian government, as well as by the rest of the Arab world, which is increasingly appalled by the violence.
Mrs. Clinton underscored this point in remarks Wednesday after meeting with India’s foreign minister: “Russia says it wants peace and stability restored. It says it has no particular love lost for Assad. And it also claims to have vital interests in the region and relationships that it wants to continue to keep. They put all of that at risk if they do not move more constructively right now.”
Though Mrs. Clinton’s remarks about the helicopters came in answer to a question at a session sponsored by the Brookings Institution, they were part of a lengthy discussion of the West’s options in dealing with Syria and seemed anything but accidental.
Administration officials declined to give details about the helicopters, saying the information was classified. But White House and intelligence officials have backed up the substance of her comments. Some officials said that whether the helicopters were new or refurbished, they were equally deadly when turned against the civilian population.
“What Secretary Clinton said was a continuation of what we’ve been saying,” the White House spokesman, Jay Carney, told reporters. “The situation in Syria is obviously terrible. Assad’s brutality is unacceptable. He will go down in history as a tyrant who will be loathed by generations of Syrians who are the victims of his brutality.”
Timing may have also driven Mrs. Clinton. In her remarks, she noted that the United Nations Security Council must decide by mid-July whether to extend the mandate for Kofi Annan’s six-point peace plan, which included putting monitors on the ground to try to ensure the government and rebel fighters were abiding by the terms of a cease-fire. Mr. Annan is the special envoy for the United Nations and the Arab League.
