Diplomats fear Russia may use Syrian aid as bargaining chip in Ukraine

WASHINGTON • Only one route remains open for international convoys bringing food, water and other aid to over one million Syrians besieged by civil war.

Now, officials warn, Russia might try to shut it down or use it as a bargaining chip with world powers in another war, about 1,600km away in Ukraine.

Diplomats and experts said that closing the corridor at the Bab al-Hawa border crossing with Turkey would almost certainly force thousands of people to flee Syria. That would worsen a refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East that is already considered the world's largest since World War II.

The United Nations Security Council, where Russia wields a powerful veto, will vote in July on whether to keep the aid route open. But the corridor already appears caught up in the fallout of the war in Ukraine and the competing interests of Russia and the United States.

"The war in Ukraine is having wide-ranging implications for Syria - and for the whole region and for the world," Jordan's Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said in an interview this month in Washington.

He said his country was warily watching to see how Russia would approach the vote. More than one million Syrian refugees live in Jordan, he said, and brokering a peace agreement in Syria's 11-year-old civil war "would definitely need US-Russian agreement".

Using its veto power at the Security Council, Russia helped shut down three other humanitarian corridors into Syria in 2020 and last year agreed to retain the one at Bab al-Hawa only after intense negotiations with the US.

It has defended the route closures as necessary to maintaining Syria's sovereignty and has pushed for the aid to be distributed with the approval of President Bashar al-Assad's government instead of through the UN.

Russia is one of Mr Assad's benefactors in Syria's civil war, which began in 2011, and the aid was largely going to rebel-occupied areas.

An international pressure campaign to keep the route open is under way. The US is presiding over the Security Council this month and has held a series of meetings touching on the plight of Syrians who have become homeless or otherwise need aid to survive.

Russia's Deputy UN Ambassador Dmitry Polyansky said Moscow had not decided how it would vote. But in an interview on Friday, he said that under the current system, the aid was vulnerable to extremists in Idlib.

NYTIMES