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Western powers are heading towards a clash with Russia at the United Nations over how to enforce the surrender and destruction of Syria's chemical weapons arsenal.
American, British and French diplomats were meeting at the UN in New York on Tuesday night to draw up a resolution that would set deadlines for Bashar al-Assad to give up his chemical weapons backed by the threat of force.
However, a major standoff loomed as Russia made clear it would not abandon its Syrian ally. Instead the Russian foreign ministry said Moscow would push for a security council declaration on disarmament, which would have no binding authority and would not allow the use of force against the Assad regime.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, insisted the disarmament process would work "only if the US and those who support it on this issue pledge to renounce the use of force, because it is difficult to make any country – Syria or any other country in the world – unilaterally disarm if there is military action against it under consideration".
Russia proposes to work with the Assad regime and the UN secretariat to lay out a "workable, precise and concrete" disarmament plan with a timetable but no chapter 7 enforcement mechanism.
After a phone conversation with his Russian counterpart, the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, admitted: "As I understood, the Russians at this stage were not necessarily enthusiastic, and I'm using a euphemism, to put all that into the framework of a UN binding resolution."
The US, UK and France all stressed that they would not allow Russia or Damascus to play for time. The US secretary of state, John Kerry, told a hearing of the House of Representatives armed services committee the US was waiting for details of the Russian proposal, "but we're not waiting for long".
He said: "President Obama will take a hard look at it. But it has to be swift, it has to be real, it has to be verifiable.
"We have to show Syria, Russia and the world we are not going to fall for stalling tactics."
David Cameron delivered the same message in Westminster saying the UK did not want the Russian disarmament proposal to be "some delaying tactic, some ruse to buy time for a regime that must act on chemical weapons".
Referring to the planned UN resolution, the prime minister said "there would have to be consequences" if it wasn't done.
However the western powers' tough rhetoric is weakened by the lack of enthusiasm at home for military action. Parliament has ruled out British involvement in punitive strikes, and the US president, Barack Obama, faces stiff resistance in Congress.
"I think there is a high risk of another car crash at the security council," said Richard Gowan of the centre for international co-operation at New York University. "It will be very, very difficult for Obama to accept a resolution that doesn't involve a threat to Assad. Putin is daring him to walk away from the UN and go back to Washington, knowing he can't count on support there. The Russians hope that when he's faced with that trap he will climb down."
The White House abandoned its earlier plan to seek open-ended authorisation for punitive air strikes in response to the Assad regime's alleged use of chemical weapons in a civilian massacre in eastern Damascus on 21 August.
Instead, the Obama administration was working on Tuesday night with a bipartisan group of eight senators to craft a new resolution that would set a deadline for Syrian co-operation with the UN on disarmament, and authorise the use of force if that deadline was broken.
The White House is hoping the redrawn resolution would draw more congressional support, particularly from Republicans, as it would be framed as a show of resolve in the diplomatic stand-off with Moscow.
The new resolution originally floated by the Democrat senators Joe Manchin and Heidi Heitkamp would give Syria 45 days to comply with the UN chemical weapons convention and then leave the White House to decide whether military action was required if Assad was deemed to have failed to taken sufficient steps.
The Manchin-Heitkamp motion is likely to be substantially revised by the Senate leadership to take into account the proposed Russian deal, but may provide a template for how Congress can maintain pressure on Assad without forcing a vote on authorising military action that Obama risks losing.
On Tuesday Human Rights Watch said evidence from the massacre of civilians in eastern Damascus last month strongly suggested the Syrian government carried out the chemical weapons attacks.
The report based its conclusions on testimony from witnesses and medical staff as well analysis of the armaments used, which HRW said were of a type used only by the Syrian military. The effect on the victims pointed to a nerve agent, "most likely sarin".
It said it was impossible so far to give an exact death toll, but noted that the estimate in just one district was over 700 and that Médecins Sans Frontières had reported that at least 3,600 people were treated for symptoms consistent with exposure to neurotoxins.
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