France on Wednesday joined the United States in putting threatened military action against Syria on hold as the world waited for Bashar Assad's regime to act on its pledge to give up its chemical weapons.

President Barack Obama on Tuesday asked U.S. lawmakers to delay a vote on whether to authorize strikes against Syria to allow Russian-led attempts to broker a handover of Syria's arsenal time to bear fruit.

France said Wednesday it would remain poised to launch military action against Syria over its use of chemical weapons despite ongoing attempts to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis.

The warning came after a meeting between President Francois Hollande, his foreign and defense ministers and senior military figures.

Three astronauts returned to Earth Wednesday on board a Russian Soyuz capsule after a half-year mission on the International Space Station (ISS), landing in Kazakhstan, mission control in Moscow announced.

Russians Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin landed on schedule at 8:58 am Kazakh time (0258 GMT) in the Kazakh steppe, along with American Chris Cassidy.

Caretaker Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour lauded on Wednesday the Russian plan to secure Syria's chemical weapons, applauding any “peaceful” solution for the crisis to evade possible negative repercussions on the region and Lebanon.

“The Russian plan on Syria is welcomed. We back any peaceful solution for the crisis because any other option could have repercussions on the entire region including Lebanon,” said Mansour in an interview with the al-Joumhouria daily.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday the United States should renounce the option of using force in Syria to allow checks on Damascus' chemical weapons to go ahead.

"It all makes sense and can work if the U.S. side and all those who support it renounce the use of force," he said according to Russian television.

Russia on Tuesday handed down a 10-year sentence to a man who confessed to plotting to assassinate President Vladimir Putin by blowing up his motorcade, the prosecutor-general's office said.

Prosecutors had accused Ilya Pyanzin of drawing up the plot as a member of an armed group created on the orders of Chechnya's top Islamist rebel Doku Umarov.

Russia clashed once again with Western powers Tuesday as envoys drafted a U.N. resolution to add muscle to a plan to strip Syria of its chemical weapons.

U.S. President Barack Obama maintained his threat to launch military strikes against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, even while cranking up the diplomatic pressure on Moscow.

Russia's dramatic intervention in the Syria crisis has succeeded in putting military action on hold because that suits almost everyone but the rebels fighting Bashar Assad's regime, analysts said Tuesday.

Despite widespread skepticism over whether Assad can be trusted to hand over his chemical weapons arsenal, the United States and its European allies have agreed to give Russia time to try and achieve that goal, at the risk of bolstering the Syrian dictator's grip on power.

The chaos in Syria will only get worse and destabilize the entire region if the global community fails to act, key figures of the war-torn country's opposition said Tuesday.

Only Washington can deter Bashar Assad's use of chemical weapons and so the U.S. Congress should give the White House the go-ahead to target the strongman, they added.

U.S. President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin discussed the idea of placing Syrian chemical weapons under international control at last week's G20 summit in Saint Petersburg, Putin's spokesman said Tuesday.

"The issue was discussed," spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted by Russian agencies as saying in response to the question of who initiated the proposal that Syria hand over its chemical arsenal in order to avert a U.S. strike.