Carnage in Homs Escalates as U.S. Shuts Embassy in Syria

U.S. President Barack Obama said that, however hard Western countries are prepared to lean on Assad diplomatically, they still had no intention of using force to topple him, as they did against Moammar Gadhafi in Libya last year.

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"I think it is very important for us to try to resolve this without recourse to outside military intervention. And I think that's possible," he told NBC's "Today" show.

The opposition Syrian National Council's Catherine al-Talli told Reuters shelling of Homs early on Monday killed 50.

Assad's opponents say his tanks and artillery killed more than 200 people in the city on Friday night in the bloodiest incident of the 11-month-old uprising against his rule.

That attack, branded a "massacre" by France and "unspeakable" by Obama, set the stage for intense efforts over the weekend to lobby Moscow not to block the U.N. Security Council resolution.

But Russia argued the resolution was one-sided and would have amounted to taking the side of Assad's opponents in a civil war. China also vetoed the measure, by most accounts following Russia's lead.

"It is sad that the co-authors decided to hastily put the resolution to a vote, even though we appealed to them with a request to give it a few more days" until after his own planned trip to Damascus, Lavrov said.

"Some of the voices heard in the West with evaluations of the results of the vote in the U.N. Security Council on the Syria resolution sound, I would say, improper, somewhere on the verge of hysteria," Lavrov told reporters after meeting the foreign minister of Bahrain, one of the Arab states that has sought a tougher stance against Assad.

RUSSIAN ROLE

Lavrov has said Russia favors a peace dialogue in Syria that is free of outside interference and preconditions.