Could Russia Have Stopped the US Strike on Syria?

Standing firm, the Trump administration signaled new sanctions would soon follow the missile attack, and the Pentagon was even probing whether Russian Federation itself was involved in the chemical weapons assault that compelled President Donald Trump to action.

President Donald Trump's decision to launch more than 50 missiles at the Syrian base responsible for a deadly chemical attack is nearly completely opposite of then candidate Trump's views on foreign policy.

The President made the comments following a Security Council meeting in the wake of United States missile strikes on the Shayrat air base.

"The United States will no longer wait for Assad to use chemical weapons without any consequences", Haley said.

It has been blamed on Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime.

After spending years warning USA leaders that Syria was a unsafe quagmire, Trump is said to have been moved by the gripping images of young Syrian children's listless bodies that were beamed across the world following the chemical attack. "The world is waiting for Russian Federation to reconsider its misplaced alliance with Bashar Assad".

"We are prepared to do more but we hope that will not be necessary", she said.

The U.S. launched a missile strike late Thursday in response to a chemical attack earlier this week that officials said was conducted by Syrian President Bashar Assad's military.

"We expect that those (sanctions) will continue to have an important effect on preventing people from doing business with them", Mnuchin said.

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson will call for new sanctions on Russian Federation if it does not cut ties with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad following an escalation of the conflict in Syria, the Times reported Monday.

He stressed that whether the attack is chemical or not, almost 1 million victims have been killed in Syria, and that the world should act against all kind of civilian casualties, regardless of how they were killed. Trump has been fighting accusations that his election campaign may have colluded with the Russians to help him win the presidency.

Mr Johnson has scrapped a visit to Russian Federation next week so US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson can go alone and deliver a clear message.

After President Donald Trump's election victory, the United States and Russian Federation appeared headed toward their smoothest ties in decades. The drone returned late in the day as citizens were going to a nearby hospital for treatment. The man who has promoted "America first" and shown mostly hard-headed realism on global affairs has abruptly launched a humanitarian intervention.

The officials, who insisted on anonymity in order to discuss the sensitive matter, said they believe the hospital attack may have been an effort to cover up evidence of the earlier assault. Still, he said the strike on the base, Syria's second-largest, with a fleet of Sukhoi-22, Sukhoi-24 and MiG-23 warplanes, is more a moral blow than a military one.

"We don't see a peaceful Syria with Assad in there", Haley said.

The president also mentioned Turkish government statements saying that the use of a nerve agent was detected during the treatment of chemical weapons attack victims on the Turkey-Syria border in the presence of World Health Organization (WHO) experts.

So Trump had to make clear to the Kremlin that the United States would not tolerate this brazen breach of the 2013 pact. Moscow was quick to denounce the missile strikes launched from two USA destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

It represents a substantial escalation of the U.S. military campaign in the region, and could be interpreted by the Syrian government as an act of war.

Al-Talawy said that after the bombing dozens of ambulances rushed to the area to evacuate the wounded adding that people living nearby saw balls of fire that lit through the sky when the missiles hit the base. He also said the Syrian government did not engage in chemical warfare earlier this week, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry - despite what activists and the USA government have said.