In Geneva, Russia's Foreign Minister Still Claimed Chemical Attack Was 'Fabricated' Speaking to Russian state television in Geneva on Saturday, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov presented the framework agreement signed that day not as a response to a mass killing by the Assad government, but as a way to prevent Syria's stockpiles of poison gas from falling into the hands of jihadist rebels. Mr. Lavrov claimed that Russian investigators had established that "militants" were behind a number of previous chemical attacks in Syria, according to a translation of his remarks published on Monday by the Moscow news agency Interfax. Making only vague reference to "lots of evidence delivered by independent experts onsite," including "a nun from a local convent" and unnamed "eyewitnesses and Western reporters," he went on to say that the Aug. 21 rocket attack with sarin gas on rebel-held areas outside Damascus had been staged. This conclusion was borne out, he said, by "European and U.S. experts, including 12 retired officers of the Pentagon and the C.I.A., who sent an open letter to President Barack Obama to explain how the case had been falsified." Mr. Lavrov appeared to be referring to a letter published this month by the American group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. While the group's letter did suggest that "a false-flag attack" was "possible," the former intelligence professionals presented no evidence that the gas attack had been carried out by the rebels. Instead, they, too, made only vague reference to "a growing body of evidence from numerous sources in the Middle East" making what they called "a strong circumstantial case that the Aug. 21 chemical incident was a pre-planned provocation by the Syrian opposition and its Saudi and Turkish supporters." This lack of specific evidence, however, did not prevent the Russian government news network RT, or Russia Today, from presenting an interview with one of the men who signed the letter, the former C.I.A. analyst Ray McGovern, under the headline, "C.I.A. Fabricated Evidence to Lure U.S. Into War With Syria." Russia Today is promoted as a news source with a prominent link on the home page of the Russian foreign ministry's English-language Web site. In response to the release of the U.N. report on Monday in New York, Russia's U.N. ambassador Vitaly I. Churkin told reporters that the allegations that in it was the opposition who used chemical weapons, cannot be simply shrugged off. He went on to suggest that it was unlikely that the government had fired the rockets on Aug. 21 because there were no reports of Syrian rebel casualties. Is it even theoretically possible to fire five or six rockets against your opponent and have all of them miss the targets? After meeting the French foreign minister Laurent Fabius in Moscow on Tuesday, Mr. Lavrov disagreed sharply with his counterpart's insistence that the report indicted that the Assad government was responsible for the attack, the BBC reported. We want objective professional assessment of the events of 21 of August. We have serious grounds to believe this was a provocation," Mr. Lavrov said. Mr. Lavrov also said Tuesday that the report did not reach a conclusion about "whether the munitions used in the attack were produced at a factory or were home-made." He added: "It doesn't answer our other questions. So the document needs careful study in conjunction with other evidence currently available online and in the media. As my colleagues Rick Gladstone and C.J. Chivers reported, the U.N. investigators "were unable to examine all of the munitions used, but they were able to find and measure several rockets or their components. In his remarks on Tuesday, The Washington Post reported, Mr. Lavrov "said the discovery of Cyrillic lettering on one of the rockets that delivered the gas was not significant. He suggested that other nations, including some in the West, have been counterfeiting old Soviet weaponry, and he called on them to stop doing so. As my colleagues also explained, the U.N. findings did contain evidence suggesting that the rockets carrying dozens of liters of chemical weapons had come from the direction of a Syrian military base: One annex to the report also identified azimuths, or angular measurements, from where rockets had struck, back to their points of origin. When plotted and marked independently on maps by analysts from Human Rights Watch and by The New York Times, the United Nations data from two widely scattered impact sites pointed directly to a Syrian military complex. Late last month, Mr. Lavrov argued at a news conference that one of several "reasons to doubt the rebel narrative" was the claim "in some blogs" that video clips showing victims of poison gas "had been posted on the Internet hours before the chemical attack against the opposition forces was announced." As The Lede explained in a post debunking that conspiracy theory, however, that claim was made by pro-Assad bloggers who were confused about which time zone YouTube uses to assign dates to video clips uploaded from Syria to the company's California servers. The United Nations report published on Monday said that rockets loaded with poison gas had struck the outskirts of Damascus in the early morning on Aug. 21. Video uploaded to YouTube at any time before 10 a.m. local time in Syria that day would have been automatically assigned the date in California at that time, Aug. 20.