Obama and Putin set out competing views on Syria — UN General Assembly

The Kremlin announced Wednesday that President Vladimir Putin has sent a request to Russia’s upper chamber of parliament asking lawmakers to authorize using the Russian army overseas. Military conversation between Russian Federation and the U.S. was cut off following the latter’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Much of their debate was over the role Syrian President Bashar al-Assad should – or should not – play in the fight.

There are now 32 Russian warplanes based neat the Syrian port city of Lattakia, guarded by 1,700 Russian marines.

“There was agreement that Syria should be a unified country, united, that it needs to be secular, that Islamic State needs to be taken on, and that there needs to be a managed transition”, Mr Kerry said.

The militants control large areas in both countries, exploiting chaos created in Syria by a civil war that began more than four years ago when Assad cracked down on protests against his government.

“We did not agree on any specific steps, but on continuing our cooperation and discussions between ministries of foreign affairs and of defence in order to identify specific ways and means to achieve our common goals”, an online statement released by the ministry quoted Lavrov as saying.

President Barack Obama on Tuesday pledged all possible tools – military, intelligence and economic – to defeat the Islamic State group, but acknowledged the extremist group has taken root in Syria and Iraq, is resilient and continues to expand.

Ivanov said the motion comes after Moscow received a request from Assad asking for help.

Asked about the possibility of Russian aircraft joining air strikes on the IS, Putin said in New York on Monday that Moscow would do so in full conformity with global law.

“We think it is an enormous mistake to refuse to co-operate with the Syrian government and its armed forces who are valiantly fighting terrorism face to face”, said Mr Putin. “There is no talk and there can’t be any talk about involvement of Russian military units in ground operations”.

But he added that military action alone would not succeed unless efforts were made to address the conditions that allow Islamic radicalism to thrive.

A U.S.-led coalition has been bombing Islamic State targets in Syria for about a year with a separate coalition with a few of the same countries striking the militants in neighbouring Iraq. “So we must work with these countries to explain to them that the route to a solution does not go through Bashar Al Assad”.

He did not give any figures of the number of planes likely to be involved or the number of Russian military specialists on the ground inside Syria to back up the operation. As few as 14 percent would support the move, according to a poll by the Levada polling agency published Monday. The resolution was withdrawn by the Kremlin in June, although it was only in August that large-scale evidence emerged of Russian troops in east Ukraine.

The Federation Council discussed Mr Putin’s request for the authorisation behind the closed doors on Wednesday.