MOSCOW, December 7 (RIA Novosti) – Experts from Russia and the United States will hold consultations in the coming days with Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN and Arab League peace envoy to Syria, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.
Lavrov met on Thursday with Brahimi and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to discuss possible ways of settling the ongoing conflict in Syria.
“We have agreed with Americans that our experts will meet in the coming days with Brahimi and his people and simply have a brainstorm with Geneva accords laid out on the table,” Lavrov said.
At a meeting on Syria in Geneva on June 30, foreign ministers from UN Security Council permanent member states and from Syria’s neighbors proposed establishing a transitional Syrian government that would comprise both the Syrian authorities and opposition forces, but incessant fighting in Syria has made it impossible to launch a dialogue so far.
Lavrov said Brahimi hopes that Moscow and Washington will back his efforts in organizing a dialogue with the ruling authorities and opposition in Syria in order to find out what could be implemented in practice based on the Geneva accords.
Russia and the United States have been locked in a stalemate over the 20-month-old Syrian conflict.
The United States accuses Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of crimes against his own people and has insisted that he step down.
Moscow, meanwhile, has said the fate of Syria’s leadership must not be dictated from the outside and has warned that intervention in the violence could result in a government takeover by Islamist militants.