AFP, United Nations :
Russia and the United States clashed at the United Nations over the carnage in Syria on Wednesday, as air strikes pounded Aleppo following the collapse of a ceasefire.
An angry US Secretary of State John Kerry demanded at a UN Security Council meeting that Russia force Syria to ground its air force, which Washington blames for an attack on an aid convoy.
Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov are to sit down with key players in the conflict on Thursday to try to revive the ceasefire and chart a new course towards ending the five-year war.
“We are at a make or break moment,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the council, urging world powers to use their influence to help restart political talks so Syrians can “negotiate a way out of the hell in which they are trapped.”
Russia and the United States negotiated the latest ceasefire plan, but Syria ended the truce on Monday following an apparently accidental US-led coalition strike on Syrian soldiers.
Shortly after the truce ended, the UN aid convoy was hit, killing 20 humanitarian workers and destroying 18 trucks carrying food for desperate civilians in Aleppo province.
On Wednesday, heavy bombardment pummeled Aleppo city and the wider province, key battlegrounds in Syria’s conflict, and a raid hit a medical team late Tuesday.
Addressing the council, Kerry said the bombing of the aid trucks raised “profound doubt” about whether Russia and its Syrian ally were committed to upholding a ceasefire.
“We must move forward to try to immediately ground all aircraft flying in those key areas in order to de-escalate the situation and to give a chance for humanitarian assistance to flow unimpeded,” he said.
Moscow denies that Russian or Syrian planes carried out Monday’s strike on the aid convoy.
A Russian military spokesman said a coalition drone was in the area when the aid trucks were destroyed, a claim the Pentagon denied.
After halting aid operations in response to the convoy attack, the United Nations said it was ready to resume humanitarian deliveries.
