Russia is backing away from a proposal to supply the Syrian government with a state-of-the-art missile defense system following a visit to Moscow by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to media reports.
An aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly said that Moscow was not considering supplying Syria with S-300 ground-to-air missiles, Reuters reported, citing the Russian newspaper Izvestia.
“For now, we’re not talking about any deliveries of new modern systems,” the aide, Vladimir Kozhin, reportedly said.
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The S-300 sales to Syria were raised last month after the U.S., France and the United Kingdom launched a series of strikes on Syria in response to a chemical weapons attack in a Damascus suburb allegedly carried out by the Syrian government.
After that, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Moscow had no obligation to refrain from delivering the missile defense systems to Syria, a close ally of Russia.
But the prospect of the S-300 sales raised concern in Israel, which has conducted a number of airstrikes in Syria in recent years. On Thursday, Israel struck a number of Iranian targets in Syria in response to what its military said was an Iranian rocket attack on Israeli forces in the Golan Heights.
Netanyahu has been lobbying Putin not to deliver the missile defense systems to Syria.
Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the Kremlin, told reporters on Friday that the S-300 sales were never announced, and that Moscow reserved the right to do anything it considered necessary following the allied strikes on Syria.