His remarks came as US Secretary of State John Kerry said Moscow must pull its troops out of Ukraine and that sanctions on Russian Federation would remain in place until it implements all aspects of the Ukraine peace agreement reached in Belarus a year ago. That calls for further peace talks. These were suspended earlier this month in Geneva before they got off the ground.
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“It requires the opposition groups to stop fighting”.
Russian Federation had proposed the March 1 ceasefire, but the USA and others saw that as a ploy to give Moscow and the Syrian army three more weeks to try to crush Western- and Arab-backed rebels. The government forces aim to advance in the direction of the ISIS capital in the coming days. “In general, the Raqqa front is open… starting in the direction of the Tabqa area”, the source said.
The fall of the rebel-held side of Aleppo would be the biggest blow to the opposition since the war began.
But when asked on Saturday at a security conference in Munich to assess the chances of the ceasefire deal succeeding, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov answered: “49 percent”.
He added: “There’s one man on this planet who can end the civil war in Syria by making a phone call, and that’s Mr Putin”.
“If Russia or the Assad regime violates this agreement, what are the consequences?”
He said some of the extremists in Syria are from Russian Federation and would otherwise return to commit acts of terror.
Using his customary term Daesh -a scornful Arabic acronym – to refer to the Islamic State group, Kerry said: “We’re going to defeat Daesh and… our progress is measurable and growing on a steady basis”.
Reports from state television and the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed the forces had captured Tamoura and were now overlooking the town of Hayan and parts of the town of Anadan. The fighting around Syria’s largest city of Aleppo has brought government forces closer to the Turkish border than at any point in recent years, routing rebels from key areas and creating a humanitarian disaster as tens of thousands of people flee.
Also on Saturday, Turkey announced it is coordinating with Saudi Arabia on a possible ground operation against “Islamic State” in Syria.
Medvedev raised hackles during the Munich Security Conference over the weekend, when he said the world had “slid into a new period of Cold War”.
President Barack Obama, who seems to have lost any interest in this increasingly perilous concatenation of events, has relinquished the lead in the region to Russian Federation and told Mr Putin that he backs the Munich initiative.
“But it allows Russian Federation [to] continue bombing terrorists which it insists is everyone, even civilians”, he said. “That is not true”, he said and added there is no evidence. “We all know civilians are being killed”.
Turkey’s military hit Kurdish and Syrian regime targets Saturday in the northern province of Aleppo, a state-run news agency reported, as hopes of securing a temporary truce in Syria within a week dimmed amid spiraling violence.
“To date, the vast majority of Russia’s attacks have been against legitimate opposition groups”.
Syrian troops have been advancing with the help of intense Russian airstrikes.
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Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, made clear what the real goal of the Turkish-Saudi cooperation is.
