Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said that new USA sanctions over the Ukraine crisis have hampered joint efforts by both sides to resolve “regional conflicts” – a reference to the Syria war.
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“Bottom line, we’re still pursuing these talks”, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said yesterday.
Russian Federation says that any opposition group that is part of the ceasefire talks must break off ties with Islamist extremists like Al-Qaeda.
The pair met at a hotel on the banks of lake Geneva and made brief remarks to reporters about North Korea’s latest nuclear test before beginning their closed-door talks on Syria. The State Department says they have spoken by phone four times in the past two days: three times on Wednesday and once on Thursday.
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Washington and Moscow are backing different sides in Syria’s five-year-old civil war that has killed up to 400,000 people.
Lavrov briefly met with the United Nations special envoy on Syria, Staffan de Mistura, at a lakefront hotel in Geneva on Thursday night.
Under the Syria plan Mr. Kerry put forward in July, the US and Russian Federation would share information and coordinate air attacks, and target only Islamic State and the Syria Conquest Front, the al Qaeda-linked militant group formerly known as Nusra Front. Syrian troops and their allies also retook nearly all the territory lost since a July 31 rebel offensive in south and southwestern Aleppo province, according to the group, which monitors the conflict through activists on the ground.
“Once we feel like we’re closer to a settlement and a meeting would be valuable, then we’ll have that meeting”.
Almost 300,000 people have been killed and half of the population have fled their homes.
Russia’s military intervention previous year has shored up Mr Assad’s position.
Russian Federation has been keen to unify its counterterror campaign with that of the United States, but up to now Washington has held back. But the State Department would not confirm that meeting, and Kerry remains in Washington. Russia’s support for Assad, he said, “has made the situation in Syria more risky, more prolonged and more violent”.
US National Intelligence director James Clapper has been another vocal opponent of any enhanced US-Russian coordination.
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“We need to see a situation where it’s clear within whatever is being agreed with the Russians that there won’t be a siege of Aleppo”, a senior USA official told reporters. “The Russians have conditions they want to see met and addressed; we have our own”. “If we thought [the Russians] were just playing for time, we wouldn’t have come back to talk”.
