The Paris attacks have helped the West understand that the priority in Syria is to fight ISIS not to topple President Bashar al-Assad, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday, according to Russian agencies.
Lavrov reiterated Moscow’s position that there was no way to solve the Syria crisis peacefully without Assad, who he said represented the interests of a significant part of Syrian society.
Meanwhile, Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem plans to visit Russia on Nov. 25, Sputnik news agency reported on Thursday, citing Syria’s embassy in Moscow.
Walid al-Moualem will visit Russia next week for talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov about his country’s crisis and the struggle against terrorism, RIA news agency reported on Wednesday.
Coordination with France
Russia’s chief of general staff held talks with his French counterpart on Thursday on combating ISIS in Syria, in the first such contact since the start of the Ukraine conflict last year.
Valery Gerasimov and Pierre de Villiers “discussed on the phone the coordination of military troops’ actions against ISIS terrorists in Syria,” the Russian defence ministry said in a statement, adding that the conversation lasted an hour.
The two military chiefs “exchanged their evaluations of the current situation in the country” following calls to unite efforts against ISIS group by presidents Vladimir Putin and Francois Hollande.
“The terrorist acts in Paris and on board of the Russian passenger plane are links of one chain,” Gerasimov was shown by state television as saying on the phone to his French colleague.
“Our grief and our wrath must help join efforts of Russia and France in the fight against international terrorism.”
Putin on Tuesday ordered his navy in the eastern Mediterranean to cooperate with a group of French ships set to arrive in the area Friday and “treat them as allies,” which would be the first such joint operation since World War II.
De Villiers and Jean-Yves Le Drian, the defence minister of NATO member France, had no contact with Russian counterparts since Moscow annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in March 2014, according to a French source familiar with the situation.
Moscow and Paris announced close cooperation against the Islamic State group following the bombing of a Russian airliner over Egypt and the attacks in the French capital, which killed 224 and 129 people respectively.
AFP
