Lavrov hopes Moscow meeting on Syria will pave way for practical steps

MOSCOW, January 21. /TASS/. Russia hopes that the inter-Syrian meeting in Moscow on January 26-29 will help translating the dialogue between the government and the opposition into practice, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a news conference on Wednesday. “As for the Moscow meeting, we agreed from the very beginning that we want to help preparing for a new round of talks. A calm discussion is needed between the direct participants of the process - the government and various opposition groups, and the opposition needs to be representative,” he said. The goal of the Moscow meeting is that the opposition members will gather “in one room,” Lavrov said, adding that the dialogue will be held only between the Syrians and no official Russian representatives will be sent there. “We hope that after the discussion the opposition members will be able to find understanding that they want to live in Syria which is a sovereign state with territorial integrity and its ethnic and religious groups are equally protected,” he said. “We will be offering the venue and use the fact that Moscow is the only place where most opposition representatives and the government are ready to come,” he said. The Russian foreign minister said he expects that the number of participants will grow. “Those who have not still confirmed their participation still have time,” he said. Lavrov noted that the understanding is growing in the United States that there is a need to fight against the Islamic State (IS). “It is most important to switch it to practical actions,” he said. “Russia said a long time ago that eradicating terrorism and preventing turning Syria into a terrorist state and preventing fulfilling plans on creating a caliphate in this region is a much more important task than a regime change,” he said. The latest high-level talks on Syria’s future, known as the Geneva 2, took place almost a year ago. Since then, no steps have been taken to resume the inter-Syrian contacts. Syria’s civil war, which began in the early spring of 2011, has so far killed nearly 200,000 people, according to the United Nations figures. Read more