Philip Hammond said President Vladimir Putin’s announcement that the “main part” of Moscow’s forces were being withdrawn could be “positive”.
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At the same time, Putin has reached some core military goals, securing control of a port traditionally used by Russian Federation as well as an airbase.
US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday he will meet with President Vladimir Putin in Russian Federation next week on the crisis in Syria, after Moscow announced the partial withdrawal of its forces.
“… Because Putin never actually spelled out what the objectives of the Russian military intervention were, and because most of his military attacks were aimed at the opposition forces and not the Islamic State group, only he can determine what constitutes success and when it was achieved”, writes Bar’el, drawing a comparison to the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 and Afghanistan in 2014.
“As we mark the fifth anniversary of the start of this horrific war, we may face the best opportunity that we’ve had in years to end it”, he said, ahead of a meeting with Georgia’s Foreign Minister Mikheil Janelidze. In this provided by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service, Russian soldiers load ammunition on a cargo plane at Hemeimeem air base in Syria on Tuesday, March 15, 2016.
The ministry of defence said that a Tu-154 airliner carrying engineering and technical personnel was leading a group of Su-34 strike fighters back to Russian Federation.
On the ground, a cease-fire has been in effect since late February. Russian Federation urged the Syrian leader to be “constructive” in the negotiations to end the five-year conflict, which has killed more than 250,000 people, sparked a refugee exodus to Europe and allowed Islamic State a foothold.
“We did enter into substantive discussion today, we asked [Syrian government delegation’s head Bashar] Jaafari to interpret some of the proposals that the government submitted”, Ramzy told reporters after Special UN Envoy Staffan de Mistura’s meeting with the Damascus delegation.
The caveat here – a big one – is that there’s no way of knowing how closely Putin and Assad are huddling on plans for Syria’s future. The opposition, backed by Saudi Arabia and Turkey, continues to insist that Assad must step down at the start of a transitional period.
Earlier on Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Moscow’s anti-terrorist air campaign created the conditions for political process on Syrian reconciliation. In a blog post on the website of Ekho Moskvy radio, journalist Arkady Babchenko contrasted countries whose decisions on military action play out in public over weeks or months with Russian Federation, where “nothing was portended in the morning…and in the evening it was suddenly, ‘Honey, we won the war in Syria!'”
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Col.-Gen. Viktor Bondarev made the claim on Tuesday in ceremony near Voronezh, welcoming the first contingent of warplanes to return from Syria a day after the surprise announcement of a Russian pullback.
