Pressure mounts on Turkey over its clashes with Kurds in Syria

America’s continuous support for the Syrian opposition and Al-Nusra Front along the Turkey-Syria border, noted Rogachev, is seen as one of the reasons for the current tension in relations between Russian Federation and the US. The militant group, which is seeking to topple Syrian President Bashar al Assad, in July said it had cut its ties to al Qaeda and changed its name to Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, but Washington still regards it as a terrorist group. “I do not exclude that we will be able to agree on something in the near future and submit our agreements to the global community”. “For now, it is too early to say, but it seems to me that we are proceeding, as I already said, in the right direction”.

A meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US State Secretary John Kerry on the sidelines of the G20 summit in China is possible if the United States officially makes a distinction between terrorists and opposition groups in Syria, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told Sputnik.

The spokesman reiterated the long term US strategy in Syria as “a whole, unified, pluralistic Syria that has in place a government that represents the voices of all Syrians”. There is also hope of agreeing a weekly 48-hour truce in the divided northern city of Aleppo to allow aid deliveries and medical evacuations.

Assad’s future is not a focus of the current U.S.

It might be impossible to establish who engineered the release of sensitive Democratic Party e-mails but it was not done by the Russian government, he said. “The important thing is the content that was given to the public”.