Russian Federation knew in advance Syrian chemical attack was coming

BBC Monitoring reported that Peskov castigated the USA for the cruise missile strike on Shuayrat Air Base “as effectively helping Islamist militant groups active in Syria, including the so-called Islamic State and the al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front”.

The two leaders also called for an objective investigation into an incident involving chemical weapons in Syria’s Idlib and said they were ready to deepen cooperation to fight terrorism, the Kremlin said in a statement on its website.

President Donald Trump ordered the strike in response to a chemical weapons attack against civilians earlier in the week, which U.S. officials say was carried out on the orders of the Assad government.

The two-day summit in Tuscany comes as the United States moves a Navy strike group near the Korean peninsular amid concerns over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, and as the West’s relations with Russian Federation struggle to overcome years of mistrust. The session lasted roughly an hour.

During a daily press briefing on Monday, Spicer was asked what Bashar al-Assad’s regime could do to trigger another bombing attack like the one last Thursday.

Syria’s government denied it carried out any chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun, and Russia’s Defense Ministry said the toxic agents were released when a Syrian airstrike hit a rebel chemical weapons arsenal and munitions factory on the town’s eastern outskirts. US officials say the chemical weapons were stored there and that those elements add to the conclusion that Russian Federation was complicit in the attack. “They are absent from this and are navigating aimlessly in the dark”, said a senior European diplomat, who declined to be named.

“Justified and appropriate though USA action was, it was also necessarily limited”.

Some commentators suggested that Mr Trump’s air strikes – the first direct military action the United States has taken in Syria – signified a more globalist position for the President, who has previously advocated isolationist policies. In the absence of answers, other countries seem to be moving ahead on their own terms.

Opening his visit to Italy, Tillerson traveled with Italian Foreign Minister Angelino Alfano up a winding mountain road to Sant’Anna di Stazzema, the Tuscan village where the Nazis massacred more than 500 civilians during World War II.

“Armed with nuclear weapons, he would hardly flinch at the attack in Syria”, Chang said.

The most aggressive option on the shelf, one of the officials said, called for a “decapitation” strike on Assad’s presidential palace, which sits alone on a hill west of downtown Damascus.

President Trump has fallen for this scam and now the war machine is in motion.

“Congress needs to work with the president to try and deal with this long-term strategy, lack of strategy, really, in Syria”, he said.

Leading up to the US missile attack, Trump’s administration had said that Assad’s future was up to the Syrian people. He challenged Russian Federation publicly in a way Trump appeared scrupulously to avoid and said of Assad early Thursday: “It would seem that there would be no role for him to govern the Syrian people”.