The Russian envoy, Vitaly I. Churkin, adopted a “where will it all end” argument, telling reporters that the Security Council cannot prescribe ready recipes for the outcome of a domestic political process.

“Once you start, it is difficult to stop,” he said, adding that pretty soon the Council would start pronouncing “what king needs to resign, or what prime minister needs to step down.”

To a certain extent, the Arab League and the much of the world were ready to dump the eccentric Colonel Qaddafi because he had made many enemies. Mr. Assad, despite hostile relations with some neighbors and the West, continues to have a strong ally in Russia, yet analysts described Moscow as preoccupied with leadership change.

“That the Morocco resolution ‘calls for’ Assad to step aside is their worst example and fear,” said George Lopez, a professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and a sometime adviser to the United Nations. “If today it is Assad, tomorrow Putin? They worry.”

Yet in a sign that Russia was beginning to feel the need to deflect at least some of the accusations that Moscow is partly responsible for not stemming the rising death toll, Russia distanced itself from Mr. Assad himself. The United Nations stopped tallying deaths after they passed 5,400 in January, saying they were too difficult to confirm accurately, and since then the toll has mounted steadily.

“The Russian policy is not about asking someone to step down; regime change is not our profession,” Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation during a stop on a tour of Asia.

“We are not friends or allies of President Assad,” he went on, according to a transcript on the Interfax news service. “We never said that Assad remaining in power is a precondition for regulating the situation. We said something else — we said that the decision should be made by Syrians, by the Syrians themselves.”