French FM Confirms the Russians Were Warned Ahead of Trump’s Strikes
The Pentagon previously tried to claim the Russians were not "pre-notified"
At the bottom of this CNN article:
She added that France does “not seek confrontation, and we refuse any possibility of military escalation.”
“We had ensured that the Russians were warned beforehand,” Parly said.
Meanwhile the Pentagon put it this way:
“We’re not cooperating with them in Syria. We don’t want to get into a fight with them. They don’t want to get into a fight with us. The best way to do that is to share certain information about what you’re doing, carefully — carefully metered out by us, and I’m sure the same by them. But we’re not cooperating with them, and they have no veto over what we do.”
Meaning the Russians were warned in advance the strikes were coming, and were told just enough about them that they understood their forces were not in danger.
The Pentagon spokesman was at pains to say the Russians don’t have a veto over anything the US does but that is semantics. If the US doesn’t want to get into a fight with the Russians then it has to take their position into account. Of course that doesn’t mean either side has a veto on the other pulling something stupid.
Dunford: Only contestation of these strikes was from Syrian air defense systems. No mention of Russian A2/AD. The deconfliction channel with Russia was used, but Dunford says no “prenotification” of Russia. So targets were presumably not shared but perhaps airspace boxes were.
— Michael Carpenter (@mikercarpenter) April 14, 2018
– "We did not do any coordination with #Russia on these strikes, and neither did we pre-notify them.”
That’s significant too. pic.twitter.com/Xzd7GfQNCJ
— Charles Lister (@Charles_Lister) April 14, 2018