US Secretary of State John Kerry (L) and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met on August 26, 2016 in Geneva for an expected push towards resuming peace talks for war-ravaged Syria.
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The U.N. has been pushing for a 48-hour cease-fire in beleaguered Aleppo so humanitarian aid can be shipped into the city.
After meeting off-and-on with Lavrov for almost 10 hours in Geneva on Friday, Kerry said the “vast majority” of technical discussions on steps to reinstate the ceasefire and improve humanitarian access have been completed.
For its part, the United States has said that Russian Federation and the Syrian air force have used the overlap as a smokescreen to continue their attacks on rebel groups fighting to oust President Bashar al-Assad.
Syria has been mired by five years of civil war in which hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and millions have been displaced, creating the worst refugee crisis since World War II.
Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations envoy for Syria, joined the conversations, telling The Associated Press after a lunch break that “we are still working”.
There was hope that Friday’s talks between Kerry and Lavrov might help boost those efforts, but no specific pledges on Aleppo were made.
Since then, the carnage in Syria has only increased, with Aleppo becoming a humanitarian disaster zone and aid still blocked to almost two dozen similarly besieged towns and cities.
“We want to be very measured in our expectations as we go forward into this meeting, but we believe the meeting is worth having”, State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau said Wednesday. The YPG had moved west of the river earlier this month as part of a US -backed operation, now completed, to capture the city of Manbij from Islamic State. Russia, on the other hand, says the U.S.is looking to block strikes on terrorist groups out of concern that the rebels it supports would be hit. At the same time, the administration is not of one mind regarding the Russians.
He said that Aleppo continues to be besieged and bombarded by the regime and its allies and the regime has today forced the surrender of Daraya after a brutal four years of the siege and continues to take territory in the Damascus suburbs.
“I think there’s a shift in the balance of intellectual opinion in the administration, toward postponing “Assad must go” in the name of providing humanitarian assistance to save lives”, Kupchan said.
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“For the Russians, Assad is part of the solution – that’s a fundamental difference between the two sides”, said Derek Chollet, a senior adviser at the German Marshall Fund and a former member of the Obama administration.
