Russian President Vladimir Putin believes that the U.S. strike on a Syrian air base is an “aggression against a sovereign state” and has seriously hurt U.S.-Russia relations, news agencies cited the Kremlin as saying on Friday.
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov was cited as saying that the Russian leader, a staunch ally of the Assad regime, regarded the U.S. action as “aggression against a sovereign state” on a “made-up pretext” and as a cynical attempt to distract the world from civilian deaths in Iraq.
Peskov was quoted as saying that Russia did not believe that Syria possessed chemical weapons and that the U.S. move would inevitably create a serious obstacle to creating an international coalition to fight terrorism, an idea that Putin has repeatedly pushed.
Meanwhile, Interfax reported that Russians were not not hurt in the U.S. strikes in Syria.
The United States launched dozens of missiles against an airbase in western Syria in response to a suspected chemical weapons attack, which Washington blames on the al-Assad government. President Donald Trump said the move was in the US national security interest.
