U.S. air strikes launched against the regime of Bashar al-Assad on Thursday were “a clear act of aggression against a sovereign Syria,” the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement Friday.
The ministry called for an urgent U.N. Security Council meeting, and said it has suspended a flight safety memorandum that prevents conflict between Russian and U.S. forces.
Russian President Vladimir Putin believes the strikes violate “the norms of international law, and under a trumped-up pretext at that,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, TASS reported.
Peskov told reporters the air strikes would further damage the “deplorable” relations between the U.S. and Russia, which has backed al-Assad’s regime. He added that Moscow did not believe al-Assad possessed chemical weapons.
U.S. President Donald Trump justified Thursday’s air strikes as a necessary retaliation over a deadly chemical weapons attack in the Syrian province of Idlib on Tuesday.
Russia’s foreign ministry accused the U.S. of planning the air strikes before the Idlib attack, which was “used as an excuse for a show of force.”