The UN Security Council has agreed a “good text” of a resolution on Aleppo evacuation monitoring, Russia’s UN envoy told journalists. That comes after Russia’s promise to veto the French resolution and its putting forward a rival draft.
The voting on the new version of the document is scheduled for Monday, Vitaly Churkin said.
The US ambassador to the UN believes the resolution will be passed unanimously.
"We expect to vote unanimously for this text tomorrow at 9am (1400 GMT),” Samantha Power told reporters after a three-hour closed door meeting, according to Reuters.
The French-drafted resolution for placing the Aleppo evacuation under the supervision of the UN is “dangerous and impossible to implement," Russia's ambassador to the UN said earlier, promising to veto the initiative and put some new proposals on the table instead.
We cannot allow it to pass because this is a disaster,” Russia’s UN envoy, Vitaly Churkin, told journalists commenting on the French-initiated resolution.
“Actually, in certain situations we were disappointed that representatives of UN humanitarian agencies were not ready for the monitoring mission. We don’t have problems with any kind of monitoring. We will support appropriate UN monitoring process. But the idea that the observers would walk amid eastern Aleppo ruins without sufficient training and without giving an account of what will be going on there is a tragedy and a provocation. I hope that this is not an intended provocation,” he added.
Churkin said that Russia would present its own proposals at the Security Council meeting.
“We have very simple ideas and if they support those simple ideas we can have a passed resolution today,” he told journalists.
Churkin said Russia has concrete proposals on how to arrange the work of UN observers in the safest way possible.
The Security Council was then discussing the possibility of merging the Russian and French texts, a source from one of the delegations at the UNSC told journalists, according to RIA.
French ambassador to the UN Francois Delattre, however, earlier made it clear that France was reluctant to accept any changes to the resolution, according to AP.
“The draft is already the outcome of negotiations that I personally led with my colleague [Russian envoy to the UN] Vitaly Churkin. This is already the result. Whether there is still room for compromise, honestly, I don’t think so,” Delattre told reporters ahead of Security Council consultations, as cited by Sputnik.