Unsurprisingly, "nyet".

[the_archfiend]

So, about those markings on Syrian rockets that don't appear to be in Arabic?

A United Nations report finding "clear and convincing evidence" of a deadly chemical attack built new momentum Monday for demands by the United States and allies to impose tough penalties on Syria if it fails to honor promises to surrender its arsenal.

Although the 38-page report from a U.N. scientific team does not assign blame, Western diplomats and independent experts said it offers undeniable evidence that Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces fired sarin-filled rockets with Russian markings (emphasis mine) into Damascus suburbs on Aug. 21. The United States says more than 1,400 people were killed.

Western diplomats said the weapons and sarin described by U.N. experts displayed sophisticated manufacturing techniques beyond the capabilities of rebel forces, and that U.N. data about the trajectory of the rockets indicated that they were fired from government-held territory.

"The technical details of the U.N. report make clear that only the regime could have carried out this large-scale chemical weapons attack," said Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "It defies logic to think that the opposition would have infiltrated the regime-controlled area to fire on opposition-controlled areas."

On the other hand, take a guess what Russia's reaction to all this was:

Russia sharply criticized the new United Nations report on Syria’s chemical arms use on Wednesday as biased and incomplete, hardening the Kremlin’s defense of the Syrian government even while pressing ahead with a plan to disarm its arsenal of the internationally banned weapons.

The Russians also escalated their critiques of Western governments’ interpretations of the United Nations report, which offered the first independent confirmation of a large chemical weapons assault on Aug. 21 on the outskirts of the Syrian capital, Damascus, that asphyxiated hundreds of civilians.

Although the report did not assign blame for that assault to one side or the other in Syria’s civil war, analyses of some of the evidence it presented point directly at elite military forces loyal to Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. The United States, Britain, France and human rights and nonproliferation groups also say that the report’s detailed annexes on the types of weapons used, the large volume of poison gas they carried, and their trajectories, all lead to the conclusion that the forces of Mr. Assad were culpable.

I hate to be snarky, here (well, maybe I don't), but if anything this proves that the historians who thought that the Soviet urge to engage in unsavory international acts was a de facto continuation of the Russian push for imperial hegemony were right.

Communism is supposedly as dead as a doorknob in Russia, but their need to play these sort of games hasn't ended. My guess is that the one thing standing in the way of a functioning democracy in Russia (beside Putin's need to be in complete control until he either dies of old age, gets assassinated or ends up in the hands of extraterrestrials, whichever comes first) is that all a leader has to do is play to the chauvinistic Wronged Great Power sensibilities of a certain bloc of voters there and voila! That person gets to be President for life and can play the game all over again.