Stars and Stripes reports that “Russia has isolated itself from the rest of the international community through its president’s insistence that Syrian rebels carried out chemical attacks believed to have killed more than 1,000 civilians near Damascus last month, the Pentagon said Thursday.

“In a New York Times op-ed on Thursday that urged the United States to step back from its threats of strikes on Syria, Russian President Vladimir Putin wrote “’there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists.’”

“Pentagon press secretary George Little said Russia is ‘isolated and alone’ in that view.”