Russian Diplomat Blocking U.N. Action in Syria Facilitated It in Bosnia February 1, 2012, 1:25 pm An excerpt from "The Death of Yugoslavia," featuring an interview with the Russian diplomat Vitaly Churkin. As my colleague Neil MacFarquhar reports, Russia's envoy to the United Nations has refused to endorse a Security Council resolution that calls for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to step down. The envoy, Vitaly Churkin, has said that he wants to avoid repeating what unfolded in Libya last year, when a United Nations resolution designed to protect civilians led to armed intervention by a NATO-led coalition and an escalation in violence. But Mr. Churkin's presence at the United Nations is a reminder that Russia played a very different role in a previous international effort to end a conflict in another part of the former Ottoman empire, Bosnia. In 1994, when he was President Boris Yeltsin's envoy, Mr. Churkin traveled to the Bosnian Serb stronghold of Pale to persuade Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic to comply with a NATO ultimatum to withdraw their heavy weapons from the heights around Sarajevo after a massacre of civilians in the besieged city. As Mr. Churkin later explained to a British television crew, the Serbs agreed in return for an assurance that United Nation peacekeepers deployed to monitor the ceasefire would be Russians. So, could Russia now accept a Bosnia-style mission to protect civilians and keep sectarian tensions from spiraling out of control? That seems unlikely, in part because Russia's position in the world is far different under Vladimir Putin than it was under Mr. Yeltsin. Last month, after Qatar proposed sending Arab League peacekeepers to Syria, a spokesman for the Russian foreign ministry in Moscow immediately ruled out the possibility. It is also worth recalling that despite the initial United Nations effort to end the sectarian warfare in Bosnia by deploying peacekeepers and holding talks, the killing dragged on until NATO intervened militarily, bombing those Serb positions around Sarajevo and elsewhere. Colum Lynch, who blogs about the United Nations for Foreign Policy, observed this week that "Syria remains Russia's most important strategic ally and arms buyer in the Middle East, and the country hosts a Russian naval port and a network of listening stations." He added that Mr. Churkin told him in an interview just days ago that Russia had no intention of "ditching" such an important ally.