Editor’s Note: The following is an interview with Alexey Pushkov, chairman of the international-affairs committee of the Russian State Duma. It was conducted by Paul J. Saunders, associate publisher of The National Interest, on June 17, 2013.

Paul Saunders: The G-8 leaders, as you know, are meeting this week and talking about Syria. Last week President Obama’s administration announced their determination that the Assad regime had used chemical weapons and announced a decision to start supplying limited weapons to the Syrian government. You are quoted in the media to reacting very strongly to that, saying that the evidence was fabricated, saying even that the United States was lying. Those are fairly strong statements. I was wondering whether you have any evidence for that, whether you believe that the United States really fabricated evidence, and if so, why?

Alexey Pushkov: Actually, on Twitter I said that the data about the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government was fabricated in the same quarters as the data about Saddam Hussein possessing nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. What leads me to believe this is a fact is that there is no conclusive nor strong evidence that the chemical weapons were used by the Syrian army. I know that some U.S. officials who have been in Moscow showed some evidence to the Russian side, and I know the Russian side was very skeptical. The supposed evidence that was brought to Moscow was absolutely inconclusive. It was not connected to any particular place nor any particular time.

The Syrian government was absolutely not interested in using chemical weapons. It is against the interest of the Syrian government to use those weapons in small quantities, as it was by the way admitted by the American side, that it was small quantities of chemical weapons. It is absolutely counterproductive. It could have given nothing on the battlefield, but it could give a very strong pretext—for the United States, for France, Great Britain and other countries—to assert the Syrian government crossed the “red line” in order to start to finance and arm the rebels directly. So the use of chemical weapons was absolutely against the Syrian government’s interest.

But the use of those weapons by the rebels makes a lot of sense. It’s absolutely logical. It fits completely with the rebels’ attempts to get military and financial support from the United States and its European allies. In May 2013 some UN observers, among them the former prosecutor of the UN Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Carla del Ponte, made statements supporting claims that chemical weapons were used in fact by the rebels in order to bring accusations against the Syrian government. There was more information coming from the Iraqi government that they had discovered three underground factories that were producing sarin and that these three underground factories belonged to groups associated with al Qaida and the Syrian rebels.

So, having all this information, it is not difficult to see that it was in the interest of the rebels to use chemical weapons. It gave them the possibility to say that the United States should react because the Assad government allegedly crossed the “red line.” They had a place from which they could have obtained sarin—those factories in Iraq—and the small quantities that were used were exactly enough to start the wide campaign against the Syrian government, accusing it of using weapons of mass destruction.

We were not born yesterday. We remember ten years ago, when the Bush administration deceived the United States and the whole world by implying that they had strong evidence of Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction. It turned out that this was a complete lie. It was fabricated—and I insist on using this term—it was fabricated inside the administration. It was fabricated for political reasons, because George Bush needed a pretext to invade and occupy Iraq.

Paul Saunders: The United States has announced that it’s going to provide small arms and ammunition to the Syrian rebels. And some people in Russia and elsewhere have reacted strongly to that. I think I saw some fairly strong statements from President Putin about the U.S. decision. Why do you think it is such a big deal for the United States to supply small arms to the Syrian rebels when Russia is supplying arms to the regime, and Iran is supplying arms to the regime? There are a number of other governments supplying arms to the rebels and certainly providing, by all indications, more than just the small arms and ammunition that the United States is now talking about providing. Of course many in the United States and Europe would argue that it’s important to give the rebels this kind of support so that the Assad regime has some sort of incentive to find a negotiated solution at the peace conference that everyone is trying to organize.

Alexey Pushkov: As seen from Moscow, it is a serious change in the position of the U.S. government. Half a year ago, Barack Obama rejected the suggestion that was advanced to him by the heads of the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon to begin arming Syrian rebels. Now it is happening, and it looks like the Americans have crossed the “red line” between political and financial support of the rebels and military support of the rebels, which actually is the first step toward engaging in the war.

It was reported in the American press that American secret services are already acting on the borders between Turkey and Syria and Jordan and Syria, trying to control the flow of weapons that were already reaching the rebels from Middle Eastern countries. It seems that about three hundred American Marines are already in Jordan to provide some logistical and/or operational support for the delivery of weapons that will start in some time to the rebels. Those are forms of engagement, and we also think that the first step can also be followed by other steps.

If Barack Obama decided to give in on this issue, then he might as well give in to the requests by people like Senator McCain, who asked to start to use American cruise missiles and air-defense systems against Bashar Assad. That would be step number two. Step number three could be a no-fly zone—and you have to support a no-fly zone by military means. Then there we are: the United States will be in a war that resembles very much the Libya War.

We think it is a big deal because there are precedents. There is a trend in American politics to consider every situation as completely separate from the previous ones. The arguments that are being used against Syria remind very much of Iraq in 2003, and this parallel undermines those arguments immensely, though no one seems to notice this in the United States. But we see how the United States and its allies are slowly moving into the direction of a Libya-type military operation. That happened only two years ago and we all saw how it started. It all started with support of the idea of defending peaceful citizens through the armament of rebel groups and then by bombings of Tripoli and a hunt for Muammar el-Qaddafi—who was killed in an absolutely atrocious way which had nothing to do with the rule of law and principles of the civilized world. And yet it was basically backed and supported by the United States and the other Western nations who organized the military operation against Libya.

What makes it all extremely dangerous is that the civil war in Syria may become a big regional war. The stakes are extremely high. It looks like we have a coalition of the United States, Great Britain, France and Israel, as well as the radical Sunnis in Syria, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, against the Shia axis (if I may use this term), which is the mostly Shia governments in Syria, Iran and Iraq, and some organizations which are backing Syria like Hezbollah.

Iraq could be dragged into this war too. The recent reports have shown that the last months have been the deadliest months for Iraq from the point of view of human losses. About one thousand people were killed by attacks in May, and almost all of them were Iraqi Shia. They are being targeted by the radical Sunnis—the same groups that are fighting in Syria. We have already heard the slogan from the radical Sunnis: “First we take Damascus, second we go to Baghdad.” So I think it is slowly moving to a situation where we’ll have a regional war with two really strong camps fighting one another. Iran has already said that it will be sending four thousand troops to back Assad. Iran has its own “red line”—not to allow the Syrian government to be brought down by rebels. So Iran seems to be quite inclined to support the present government in Syria.

An international conference, the so-called Geneva II, in theory could bring to the negotiation table representatives of the government, on the one hand, and representatives of the opposition on the other hand, to try and find some solution or at least stop the bloodshed. But in conditions when first the United Kingdom and France, and then the United States, have decided to arm the rebels, the signal that is being sent to the opposition goes against the logic of this conference. Because if these people are backed directly by the United States, the United Kingdom and France, then they have no incentive to go to the conference. They will proceed to fight on the ground against the government.

Recently, Vladimir Putin made a statement that the S-300 antiaircraft missiles, which under contract would be sent to Damascus, have not yet been delivered. The reason is—I think—that Russia did not want to spoil the prospects of Geneva II. In this context, the arming of the rebels can become an incentive for them not to take part in the conference.

It is well known that the rebels are asking for antitank weapons and antiaircraft systems. It may be just a matter of time for the United States to pass from sending small armaments to the rebels to sending them antiaircraft and heavier antitank armaments. It’s the logic of escalation. You start with small things and then you’re being dragged in.

Why do I think there will be escalation? The reason is that the rebels have been fighting Assad for two years, and they were not successful. They have managed to establish control over 20-25 percent of the territory on the border with Turkey and Jordan. The rest of the territory is more or less controlled by the government. It is true that the rebels make incursions on the territory controlled by the Syrian government, but then they go back. They cannot hold onto the positions that they seize for a couple of days.

In the last two months, the balance of forces on the battlefield has changed in the favor of the Syrian government. Until now the rebels have been unable to dislodge Assad. One of the reasons is that the rebels who started this war under the slogans of freedom and democracy are losing their appeal among the Syrian population. All of a sudden people in Syria, even those who do not sympathize with Assad, have seen that the rebels are extremely dangerous, that some of them are crazy radicals who are eating the hearts of their enemies, that they are fanatics who promise to send the Alawites to the cemetery and to chase all the Christians to Beirut. They are the people who seize and kill Christian priests. Two Christian priests had disappeared completely and were probably killed in the region of Aleppo, which caused massive indignation in a number of Christian countries such as Lebanon, Greece and Cyprus, and also in Russia. Thus the rebels appear to be the people who will bring Syria to ethnic cleansing and religious war.

Whatever can be said about Bashar Assad, under his rule, all the ethnic groups and religious groups in Syria were living in peace: the Christians, Kurds, Alawites, Sunnis, the Druze . . . I visited Damascus in February 2012 and I saw a city that was not divided by ethnic or religious animosity. But it will become a city, once the rebels come there, that will be divided by religious and ethnic animosity. Large parts of those people who want to seize power in Syria are not about democracy, they are not about freedom, and they are not about prosperity. They are about other things. Can one fight for democracy in Syria with the support of Qatar and Saudi Arabia?

So I think that by arming these people and supporting these people, the United States is committing a big mistake. By trying to dislodge Assad, whom they consider to be a dictator, it may be bringing to power forces which are much worse than Assad: a person who received a European education and who basically is somebody who observes certain rules of the game. But the people who are now trying to come to power in Syria are the same people who killed American diplomats in Benghazi. There should be no illusions. Some people who can use the United States do not necessarily like it, and will go against its interest once they achieve their goals and their ends in Syria.

Paul Saunders: Certainly in the situation with Syria and other international problems, we frequently see Russia and China take similar positions and have similar objections to U.S. and European policies. We’ve seen increasingly frequent consultation between Chinese and Russian leaders in recent years. There was just a phone conversation recently between senior leaders in the two countries, and Xi Jinping—the new president of China—made his first visit as president to Moscow. How do you see the Russia-China relationship? Is there closer cooperation? Are there any important differences between China and Russia?

Alexey Pushkov: The joint Russian and Chinese position on Syria is a fairly new phenomenon. As you know, China preferred until recently not to take an active part in the resolution of regional conflicts. In the UN Security Council it used to abstain. The fact that China supported Russia and vetoed three resolutions in the Security Council that could pave the way for foreign intervention in Syrian affairs is very telling. We experience a new quality of the Russian-Chinese strategic partnership. The Chinese are against interventionism. They do not think that those interventions are humanitarian. They don’t think those interventions have to do anything with democracy. They think it’s about geopolitics, and they are strongly against any kind of pressure being exercised on sovereign governments—first of all, on the Chinese government itself.

As far as I can judge, they see the Syrian case as a test case for the introduction of the new international model—one that will be based on the concept of multipolarity rather than the unipolarity. What happens in Syria is considered in China as matter of principle—a matter of political philosophy. They will not support a world in which a group of countries will dictate to others how to behave, and will bring down governments, finance “orange revolutions” and organize interventions like the one in Iraq, which turned to be completely non-humanitarian—it has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq itself, and is still resulting in deaths. The joint Russian-Chinese position is a reaction to the policy that the United States and its allies have been conducting for the past ten years.

The immediate reason for this cooperation between Russia and China was the Libyan War. Then in 2011, both Moscow and China abstained on Resolution 1973, and it turned out this resolution was given such a broad reading that it almost became the opposite of what was intended. This resolution was taken as a green light for a war by the use of air power and missiles against Libya. The result was that both Russia and China reconsidered their stand on Libya, and decided not to give UN legitimacy to another war of this kind.

Thus, China and Russia share the same concept: the world should not be unipolar, because unipolarity leads to wars. There is a good reason to believe this because in the last fourteen years we have seen four wars: a war in Yugoslavia, a war in Iraq, a war in Afghanistan and a war in Libya—and possibly we will see a war in Syria. All these wars were actually, with the exception of the war in Afghanistan, based on very shaky grounds.

Therefore, the proximity of Chinese and Russian views should not be considered as something accidental. Russia and China are both members of the Security Council, and consider themselves nations that should have a bigger say on the fate of the world and also on the resolution of regional crises. And they don’t want military solutions anymore. They don’t want to allow war to become the ordinary way of solving political differences and tensions in different regions and in different countries.

There are good reasons to think that Russia and China can show the same cohesion in the future, too. The main point is that the United Nations should not be used as an instrument that will cover foreign interference in the affairs of a country or region. The Security Council should no longer back these interventions, even if they are labeled humanitarian. And military support of antigovernment forces inside different countries should stop being accepted by the world and by the international community. So I think it goes really deep into the political philosophy of both Russia and China.

Paul Saunders: You referred to U.S. policy in the last ten years, really not making a distinction between the Obama administration and the Bush administration that came before it. And it was my impression certainly that when President Obama came into office, there were a number of people in Russia, in the government and the foreign policy establishment, who were pleased by that and by the administration’s reset policy of improving the U.S.-Russian relationship. But now it seems perhaps that views have shifted. Or have they?

Alexey Pushkov: Initially Obama was considered in Russia to be an antipode of George W. Bush, a president who would change policies and bring a new dimension to American foreign policy. And initially it seemed to be the case. Obama declared the policy of reset with the Russian Federation. He promised to bring back troops from Iraq and withdraw troops from Afghanistan. For a while the Obama administration managed to keep on this track. After the surge, it started to limit its presence in Afghanistan and it started to cut the number of troops present in Iraq.

But the year 2012 (after Russian parliamentary and presidential elections) became a stumbling block. We sensed a very strong, negative impulse from the Obama administration. It started to make very strong comments about the elections and criticize the Russian authorities for a number of things that were happening in Russia. So the reset worked for the first three years of the first Obama term, but in 2012 it stopped working.

During 2012, especially with Hillary Clinton in the State Department, we had the feeling that the worst years of the Bush administration were back. Hillary Clinton went as far as to say that the United States would fight with all its might against the Customs Union [of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia] and attempts to create the Eurasian Union on the territory of the former Soviet Union—even though it is well known that the Customs Union and the Eurasian Union have no political or military dimension.

There were a number of statements from Russia criticizing American policy in this really critical year. The discord over the ABM issue and of course the Syrian crisis brought the reset policy to its end. The Libyan war also contributed to the impression that Obama was not so different from Bush. As a result, in 2012 the initially positive image of the Obama administration started to deteriorate in Russia, and is still deteriorating.

The appointments of the new secretaries of state and defense were taken rather positively in Moscow. But despite this, on the practical side of the story, we don’t see many breakthroughs. The relationship between Washington and Moscow is still spoiled by the negative legacy of 2012: the year started with accusations of the Russian authorities rigging the elections, and it ended with the Magnitsky Law. In Moscow the law was seen as an unprovoked attack: Russia did not adopt an anti-American law; it is the U.S Congress that has adopted an anti-Russian law signed by President Obama. In April the so-called “blacklist” was created on the American side, and Russia responded with its own blacklist. This is the new negative agenda that unfortunately has appeared in bilateral Russian-American relations.

In Russia this administration will also be judged by its policies in Syria. There is already a feeling that we see a replay of Iraq as in 2003, with accusations against the Syrian government that are not based on incontrovertible evidence, but are just statements based on some controversial intelligence. There is a strong impression in Moscow that these accusations are just used as a pretext to engage in war. If there is an escalation, if nothing comes of Geneva II, and if after this U.S. decision the rebels start a new military campaign—and the whole diplomatic effort is devastated by this military campaign—then it can be expected that Russian public opinion of the Obama administration will not differ much from its opinion of the Bush administration.

Paul Saunders: Thank you very much.

Alexey K. Pushkov is chair of the Russian State Duma’s international affairs committee. He is a member of The National Interest's advisory council.

Paul J. Saunders is executive director of The Center for the National Interest and associate publisher of The National Interest. He served in the State Department from 2003 to 2005.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Richter Frank-Jurgen. CC BY-SA 2.0.