Russian Federation and Assad are allies.
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Dana Milbank was unimpressed by the contrast Barack Obama made yesterday during his press conference with French president François Hollande.
Russia carried out heavy raids in Syria’s northern Latakia province on Wednesday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said, in the same area where Turkey downed the Russian fighter.
Following his meeting with the French president, Obama said Russian cooperation in the fight against the Islamic State would be “enormously helpful”.
In advance of Hollande’s meeting with Putin, France sought to dismiss concerns that it might soften its stance on worldwide sanctions against Russian Federation over Ukraine in exchange for Russia’s cooperation in the fight against the Islamic State.
“I think this is a good proposal and tomorrow President Hollande will talk to us in greater detail about it. We would be ready to seriously consider the necessary measures for this”, Mr Lavrov said in Moscow.
Hollande arrived in Washington on Tuesday to talk to Obama about building a more robust global coalition to combat ISIS. But Hollande’s mission quickly became entangled with the fallout from the downed Russian military plane.
Obama cautioned that information about the incident was still emerging and he discouraged escalation.
Given these differences and hair-trigger tensions, Hollande’s more urgent agenda in Moscow now is to find ways to keep Russian and allied forces from running into each other, and to press Putin to stop bombing Syrian rebels and to accelerate diplomatic efforts to wind down the Syrian civil war.
France is carrying out airstrikes in both Syria and Iraq, having intensified its attacks after ISIL claimed responsibility for the November 13 killings of 130 people in Paris.
Both countries recently suffered devastating terrorist attacks.
France is America’s oldest ally.
Since the attacks, French police have searched more than 1,200 premises, arresting 165 people and seizing 230 weapons, including what the interior minister called “weapons of war”.
In Turkey and the Philippines last week, Obama pushed back on those proposals as un-American, drawing criticism from some who said he failed to grasp Americans post-Paris fears. “But that’s not enough”.
Hollande, who spent just a few hours in Washington as he was making his way across the globe to meet with counterparts, said France now had a “relentless determination to fight terrorism everywhere and anywhere” and would “scale up our strikes” against the Islamic State in Syria and in Iraq.
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Obama says the United States will do even more to prevent attacks at home and that there is a growing recognition after the Paris attacks that European countries need to ramp up efforts to stop the flow of terrorists. “We know it, it has a name: it’s Daesh, the Islamic State”. Obama suggested the Paris attacks had prompted “new openness” among coalition members to step up their involvement, though he did not outline any specific commitments.
