Kerry to meet Russia’s Lavrov in Malaysia on Wednesday

The invitation also comes as Croatia is anxiously awaiting news of a kidnapped citizen threatened with death by the so-called Islamic State.

A delegation of members of the Syrian National Coalition has been invited to visit Moscow next week.

The last time that the Hamas leader travelled to Moscow was in 2010, where the group discussed how to bring about a restart to peace talks with Israel.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has voiced support for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

Lavrov, however, told journalists after his meeting with Kerry in the Qatari capital of Doha on Monday that Russia’s overtures to Syrian opposition forces didn’t signal a shift in the Kremlin’s alliance with Assad.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday that the formation of a “wide anti-terrorist front” had been one of the main themes of the Kerry-Lavrov-Jubeir talks. Peace talks have been suspended for more than a year.

ASEAN Forum has finished in Kuala Lumpur.

A senior U.S. official said that in their meeting, the ministers “acknowledged the need for a political solution to the conflict and the important role to be played by opposition groups in reaching that solution”.

Lavrov added that Russian and U.S. experts will keep working to try to iron out differences. Lavrov said. “All our attempts to push the investigation, to make it transparent, to provide information… all our attempts to get answers to the questions which we formulated through our professional civil aviation agency, all these were just stonewalled”.

Lavrov was quoted in the transcript of an interview with Channel News Asia on the Foreign Ministry’s website as saying in English: “President Obama in 2009 publicly said that if the Iranian nuclear issue is resolved, there would be no need for missile defense in Europe”. The newspaper said a plan by Russian President Vladimir Putin would form a coalition of like-minded participants from the Syrian and the Iraqi armies as well as Kurds and neighboring countries.

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