Moscow will not tell Bashar al-Assad to stand down, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, stressing that while the Syrian president was not an ally it was not up to other nations to interfere.

After 10 months of internal conflict in Syria that the United Nations says has killed more than 5,400 people, Russia is under growing pressure to take a firmer line on Assad and his regime.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime will inevitably collapse in the face of mounting protests, the U.S. spy chief said Tuesday.

"I do not see how he can sustain his rule of Syria," the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, told senators. "I personally believe it's a question of time but that's the issue, it could be a long time."

A draft U.N. resolution on Syria seen by Agence France Presse Tuesday calls for the regime to put an immediate stop to violence against protesters and for President Bashar al-Assad to hand power to his deputy.

The text also stresses there will be no foreign military intervention in a conflict that the United Nations says has killed more than 5,400 people in the past 10 months.

Fearing the loss of its last Arab ally and seeking to reassert its global clout, Russia is defiantly refusing to budge in a high-stakes diplomatic standoff with the West over the crisis in Syria.

Russia, a veto-wielding U.N. Security Council member, has exasperated the West by insisting it will not back a new resolution calling on President Bashar al-Assad to step down despite the escalation of violence between the regime and the opposition.

U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon urged the Security Council to take action on Tuesday to "bear quick fruit" to end the crackdown on dissent in Syria, where more than 5,400 people have been killed.

"I hope the U.N. Security Council meeting will bear quick fruit so that the council can meet the expectations of the international community," Ban told a news conference with Jordan's Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh in Amman.

Syrian security forces on Tuesday killed at least 27 civilians, including two children, and five army deserters across the country, according to activists, as the rebel army said the embattled regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad no longer controls half of the country's territory.

Fourteen people were killed in the flashpoint northwestern province of Idlib, eleven in the central protest hub of Homs, four in the capital Damascus and its suburbs, and three in the southern province of Daraa, the Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said.

Swedish immigration authorities said Monday they were temporarily halting all deportations to Syria due to growing violence as President Bashar al-Assad's regime continues its deadly crackdown.

"The Swedish Migration Board has now temporarily stopped all deportations ... to Syria. The reason is the dramatically worsened security situation in the country," the agency said in a statement.

Russia will not back a new draft resolution on Syria, its deputy foreign minister said Monday ahead of the U.N. Security Council's debate over the latest Western-backed proposal.

"The current Western draft has not gone too far from the October version, and, certainly, cannot be supported by us," Gennady Gatilov told Interfax news agency in an interview.

The opposition Syrian National Council warned on Monday of a possible "massacre" of hundreds of young men rounded up by security forces in a town near Damascus.

It voiced "fears over a possible liquidation of hundreds of young men that Syrian security services have gathered in a public square in Rankous," 40 kilometers north of the capital, in a statement received by Agence France Presse.

The Lebanese Forces parliamentary bloc urged the government on Monday to take a firm stand against Syria’s repeated violations of Lebanon’s sovereignty in the North and Bekaa.

It said in a statement: “The government should also uncover the fate of Lebanese who recently went missing in Syria, as well as the fate of Lebanese prisoners in Syrian jails.”