Carter speaks by phone with Russian counterpart over Syria

A senior US official said Shoigu told Carter that Russia’s increased military activities are defensive in nature, and designed to honor Moscow’s commitments to the Assad government.

However, Kerry added that if Russia’s attention is on the Islamic State group, then it remains a potential partner in pushing for a political transition in Syria.

According to him, Syria will not hesitate to ask for support from Russian Federation .

Putin has provided vital support to Assad throughout a popular uprising against his regime and as the conflict has metastasized into a brutal civil war that has killed 240,000 people and displaced four million.

“The secretary and the minister talked about areas where the United States and Russia’s perspectives overlap and areas of divergence”, Peter Cook said in a statement.

The Guardian reported on Wednesday, however, that an investigation by citizen journalism project Bellingcat showed that a Russian jamming vehicle was sighted in Syria’s coastal region, which confirms the boost of military expansion in the region that could make way to the penetration of the Syrian territory and battle the Islamic State.

At a joint press conference after the meeting, Lavrov stated that Turkey and Russian Federation hold different opinions regarding the future of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and that incongruent approaches to the crisis are bound to doom any agreement between the two countries.

High-level military talks with Moscow were severed by the Pentagon in 2014 over Russia’s annexation of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine.

The U.S. has also been alarmed about reports of a Russian military build-up in Syria, at a time when the Assad government has been losing ground to rebels.

Concern in Washington over Russia’s involvement in Syria grew last week when Moscow said it had been openly sending military equipment to the Syrian government to fight terrorism, specifically the Islamic State terrorist group, which has gained significant territory in war-torn Syria and Iraq over the past year.

At the White House, spokesman Josh Earnest raised the prospect of possible Russian contributions to the campaign against Islamic State.

“And now what he’s done is… put himself in the spotlight, and on an issue where there’s a lot of tough questions for Western leaders about how they’ve been handling the crisis”.

Many in Russian political circles say they see through Washington’s increasingly tepid rhetoric that Assad must go.

Russian Federation said the talks proved both sides had common ground, state media said.

“We welcome their help to get rid of ISIL and to have a legitimate political transition”, Kerry said.

“We’ve been providing and will be providing all necessary military technical assistance and we call on other countries to join us”, Putin said in a televised address.