Diplomacy Now Officially Being Carried Out Via Twitter

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Yesterday a suicide bomber attacked a meeting of high-level Syrian officials, killing both the defense minister and the military’s deputy chief-of-staff, who was also President Bashar al-Assad’s brother-in-law. Several paragraphs down in the NYT story, we get this:

In Moscow, Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov, offering Russia’s first official commentary on the bombing, said via his Twitter account that the attack had put consensus between members of the Security Council even farther out of reach.

“A dangerous logic: While discussions on settling the Syrian crisis are being held in the U.N. Security Council, militants intensify terrorist attacks, frustrating all attempts,” he wrote.

This isn’t a first or anything, but I don’t recall ever getting an official Russian reaction to international events via Twitter before. I wonder how the Cuban Missile Crisis would have gone down if Kennedy and Khrushchev had relied on Twitter instead of diplomatic cables?

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