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WASHINGTON — The United States threatened on Wednesday to halt talks with Russia on the war in Syria and scrap plans for joint military targeting of jihadists unless the Russian and Syrian militaries stopped bombing Aleppo.
The threat, conveyed via telephone by Secretary of State John Kerry to his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov, was the sharpest warning the Americans have made to the Russians over Syria since their Sept. 9 collaboration on a cease-fire collapsed last week.
But the Obama administration did not say what steps it would take if diplomatic efforts failed entirely or how it hoped to deter Russian and Syrian forces from their offensive against rebels in Aleppo, the divided northern Syria city that has become a focal point of the war.
Mr. Kerry’s warning came as the Syrians and their Russian allies bombarded insurgent-held areas of eastern Aleppo for the sixth consecutive day in what they have described as a determined effort to eradicate terrorists.
International aid groups and rescue workers in Aleppo said that two hospitals in insurgent-held areas were hit Wednesday in predawn airstrikes, knocking out their power and forcing both to suspend work. Residents said a bakery also was struck, killing at least a half-dozen people lined up for bread.
Hundreds of civilians have been killed in Aleppo over the past week, many of them children.
Mr. Kerry told Mr. Lavrov, “The United States is making preparations to suspend U.S.-Russia bilateral engagement on Syria, including on the establishment of the Joint Implementation Center, unless Russia takes immediate steps to end the assault on Aleppo and restore the cessation of hostilities,” John Kirby, the State Department spokesman, said in a statement.
Mr. Kerry also “expressed grave concern” to Mr. Lavrov, the statement said, about what he called Russian and Syrian attacks on hospitals, the water supply network and other civilian infrastructure. Some of the airstrikes, Mr. Kerry said, included use of incendiary weapons and bunker-buster bombs, heavy-duty explosives that kill indiscriminately.
The Obama administration has repeatedly said it is Russia’s responsibility to stop its own attacks and to ensure that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria complies with the agreement Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lavrov reached nearly three weeks ago in Geneva to reduce violence in the conflict and allow humanitarian aid into besieged areas.
The two clashed over the conflict in the United Nations Security Council last week, when Mr. Lavrov said the United States had failed to persuade moderate Syrian opposition groups to separate themselves from the extremist fighters of the Nusra Front, an offshoot of Al Qaeda that now calls itself the Levant Victory Front, and abide by a cease-fire.
Mr. Kerry said the Russian and Syrian militaries were primarily responsible for the continuing violence, including the Sept. 19 bombing of an aid convoy to Aleppo, which American officials say was carried out by Russian aircraft despite Russian denials.
Mr. Kirby dismissed the Russian assertion that the Aleppo operation has been aimed at terrorists. “That’s not what’s happening,” he told reporters. “What we’re seeing them hit is not Nusra.”
When Mr. Kerry became secretary of state he often asserted his goal for Syria was to change President Assad’s “calculation” about prevailing on the battlefield and thus set the stage for a political settlement.
The United States has undertaken a covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels — forces bombed by the Russians soon after they deployed their warplanes to Syria a year ago.
But President Obama has been extremely reluctant to take additional steps, such as allowing Arab partners to provide surface-to-air missiles to the opposition, establishing no-fly zones or threatening the Assad government with punitive military action.
Nor is it clear if the administration would be willing to broaden the economic sanctions imposed on Russia in the aftermath of Moscow’s intervention in Ukraine two years ago.
Graphic | Hundreds of Thousands of Syrians Are Trapped, Unable to Get Food or Aid Civilians in these areas have limited or no access to food, medicine and basic necessities.
“Interagency conversations about other options and alternatives that might be available to us and to our partners continue,” said Mr. Kirby, who declined to provide specifics.
Asked what consequences the Russians faced if diplomacy ended, Mr. Kirby pointed to the war itself. “Extremist groups will continue to exploit the vacuums that are there in Syria, to expand their operations, which will include — no question — attacks against Russian interests, perhaps even Russian cities,” he said. “And Russia will continue to send troops home in body bags.”
Congressional critics mocked Mr. Kerry’s threat to end talks as toothless. “No more lakeside tête-à-têtes at five-star hotels in Geneva,” Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham said in a statement. “We can only imagine that having heard the news, Vladimir Putin has called off his bear hunt and is rushing back to the Kremlin to call off Russian airstrikes on hospitals, schools and humanitarian aid convoys around Aleppo.”
A statement from Russia’s Foreign Ministry did not mention Mr. Kerry’s threat to Mr. Lavrov, saying the two diplomats had “discussed possibilities of influencing the situation in Aleppo in the interest of normalizing it” by returning to their Sept. 9 agreement.
At a hastily called Defense Ministry briefing Wednesday night in Moscow, Lt. Gen. Viktor Poznikhir said the actions by Syrian and Russian forces in Aleppo were a response to militant shelling and other provocations, including what he called plans for a chemical weapons attack.
He offered no details but said, “Under these conditions, the Syrian command had to take retaliatory measures against militants.”
When the cease-fire agreement was announced, the Obama administration hoped that the possibility of joint action against militant jihadists would be enough of a lure to ensure Kremlin cooperation.
For months, Russia had pressed the United States to collaborate in Syria against the Islamic State and Nusra Front, not merely “deconflict” air operations as the American and Russian militaries do now.
For the Kremlin, Russian-American military collaboration in Syria could be presented as having validated its decision to intervene militarily in the conflict and, more generally, its aspirations to expand Russian influence in the Middle East.
But the Russian priority at this point appears to be to help the Syrian government retake Aleppo.
Even if the talks are broken off, the American military will continue to “deconflict” its air operations with the Russian military, the State Department said.
The attacks on Aleppo’s medical facilities dominated a meeting on Wednesday of the United Nations Security Council, where diplomacy aimed at halting the war has been repeatedly frustrated. A Security Council resolution adopted in May beseeching combatants to protect medical facilities in war zones has been ignored.
Joanne Liu, the international president of the medical aid group Doctors Without Borders, told the Council that threats to health care workers had worsened, warning that “throwing medical impartiality to the wind may also become a new norm of warfare.”
The Syrian ambassador, Bashar al-Jaafari, asked by a journalist whether his government had carried out the airstrikes on the two Aleppo hospitals, laughed.
Inside the Council chamber, Russia’s deputy ambassador, Evgeny Zagaynov, said he condemned attacks on medical targets but warned against a rush to blame Syria and Russia without “verifiable data.”
The British deputy ambassador, Peter Wilson, pointed out that only Russian and Syrian warplanes were bombing rebel-held eastern Aleppo. “Syria and Russia bear full responsibility for these atrocities,” he wrote on Twitter.
The secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, in some of his sharpest remarks on Syria, said about the Aleppo airstrikes: “Those using ever more destructive weapons know exactly what they are doing. They know they are committing war crimes.”
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