Russia to veto UN Security Council resolution to send observers, Report

Russia will veto a United Nations Security Council resolution aimed at allowing UN officials to monitor evacuations from the Syrian city of Aleppo.

The voting on the new version of the document is scheduled for Monday, Vitaly Churkin said.

The US ambassador to the UN believes the resolution will be passed unanimously.

“We expect to vote unanimously for this text tomorrow at 9am (1400 GMT),” Samantha Power told reporters after a three-hour closed door meeting, according to Reuters.

The French-drafted resolution for placing the Aleppo evacuation under the supervision of the UN is “dangerous and impossible to implement,” Russia’s ambassador to the UN said earlier, promising to veto the initiative and put some new proposals on the table instead.

We cannot allow it to pass because this is a disaster,” Russia’s UN envoy, Vitaly Churkin, told journalists commenting on the French-initiated resolution.

“Actually, in certain situations we were disappointed that representatives of UN humanitarian agencies were not ready for the monitoring mission. We don’t have problems with any kind of monitoring. We will support appropriate UN monitoring process. But the idea that the observers would walk amid eastern Aleppo ruins without sufficient training and without giving an account of what will be going on there is a tragedy and a provocation. I hope that this is not an intended provocation,” he added.

Churkin said that Russia would present its own proposals at the Security Council meeting.

“We have very simple ideas and if they support those simple ideas we can have a passed resolution today,” he told journalists.

Churkin said Russia has concrete proposals on how to arrange the work of UN observers in the safest way possible.