Syrian crisis makes other countries talk to Russia - experts

SOCHI, October 20 /TASS/. The Syrian conflict has made other countries start talking to Russia. But the current level of cooperation is insufficient for settling the Syrian conflict, experts polled by TASS said on the sidelines of the 2015 Valdai International Discussion Club that began its work in Sochi, Russia’s Black Sea coast, on Tuesday. Russia and the United States are involved in the Syrian conflict and both sides are delivering air strikes, Robert Cooper, the former special adviser to the European Commission, told TASS. According to him, the negative impact of this involvement consists in the fact that it is fanning the civil war even further. He said the Russian-U.S. interaction started with an aim to prevent Russian and U.S. planes from colliding in the skies above Syria was certainly a positive sign but deeper and political cooperation was necessary, in his view, to settle the conflict in the Syrian territory. According to Sir Tony Brenton, the former British ambassador to Russia, Britain shared Russia’s goal to prevent Syria from turning into an Islamist state but it did not think that President Bashar al-Assad’s ongoing stay in power was the right method to avert that. He noted that special forms of armed conflicts were appearing in the modern world. These are wars in which states are not taking part like in Syria where a war is being waged against the Islamist State terrorist group, which despite of its name, can in no way be called a state," Brenton said. The Valdai International Discussion Club was founded in 2004. More than 900 representatives of the global scientific community from 62 states have taken part in the Valdai discussions over the past 11 years. Participants in the club’s annual meetings traditionally meet the Russian president and senior government officials. The 2015 Valdai International Discussion Club has assembled over 130 experts from 30 countries. Read more