U.S. State of Secretary John Kerry has since asked Russia’s support on the ceasefire deal by changing their targets if they can not adhere to a partial ceasefire.
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US Secretary of State John Kerry speaks during the 2016 Munich Security Conference.
The White House said in a statement that the call was made to discuss the recent agreement and “stress the importance of rapidly implementing humanitarian access to besieged areas of Syria and initiating a nationwide cessation of hostilities”.
Troops are said to have nearly encircled rebels in the northern city of Aleppo in the wake of a pledge by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to retake “the whole country”.
However Medvedev said: “There is no evidence of our bombing civilians, even though everyone is accusing us of this”. “That’s ambitious, but everybody is determined to move as rapidly as possible to try to achieve this.” .
SYRIAN ARMY EYEING RAQQA Meanwhile, Syrian government forces were poised to advance into the Daesh stronghold of Raqqa province and allied Russian jets kept up air strikes on rebel-held towns north of Aleppo, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on Saturday.
In the interview, Medvedev also acknowledged that Russian Federation had “a lot of economic problems to deal with”, and that the country needed to channel its resources and did not want “any confrontation anywhere”.
Lavrov said everyday military cooperation between the US and Russian Federation in particular is “the key tool” to ensuring the delivery of humanitarian supplies and an end to hostilities in Syria.
The diplomat also said that a number of non-profit organizations (NGO) have spread untrue information about Russia’s airstrikes on civilian facilities.
The truce, or a temporary “cessation of hostilities”, was agreed Friday among five world powers, namely the United States, Russia, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and was planned to take effect within a week.
In his conversation with Euronews host Isabelle Kumar, Medvedev said Russia’s foremost interest in intervening in Syria was to protect its national interests.
At the meeting, however, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow would continue carrying out airstrikes in Syria – at least in the short term.
The entire International Syria Support Group, including Russian Federation, “has agreed to work to make that happen”, Kerry said. “It allows Russia’s assault on Aleppo to continue for another week”, he said.
Since then, more than 250,000 people in the war-torn country have been killed and more than 10 million displaced, according to United Nations figures.
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McCain, who lost the presidential race to Barack Obama in 2008, argued that Russian president Vladimir Putin was aiming to “shore up the Assad regime”.
