Russia Strong-Arms UN to Bolster Assad and Putin’s Mideast Clout
- UN budget held up over debate on human rights investigation
- Moscow has moved to fill potential void left by U.S. in region
Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin during a meeting in Moscow, 2015.
Photographer: Alexey Druzhinin/AFP via Getty Images
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It was after midnight in a windowless basement room at the United Nations headquarters in New York, and Russian diplomats were holding the organization’s $3 billion budget hostage.
Just days from the start of the new year, disheveled envoys from several countries were struggling to broker a deal that covers everything from the number of translators posted to Geneva to who gets to fly first class. Talks were paralyzed around a line item representing a sliver of the budget proposal, but one with geopolitical implications -- $17 million to investigate human rights violations in the nine-year-old Syrian conflict.