John Kerry seeks “real progress” on Syria at Moscow talks

Kerry is due to talk with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday over the Syrian crisis and other issues, while the Kremlin has not ruled out a meeting between Putin with Kerry.

The official also said Kerry would discuss a possible cease-fire in Syria with Russian officials, and he would again raise US concerns that Russia needs to focus its military operation on Islamic State militants.

Despite cooperation with Russian Federation on a political transition in Syria, the United States maintains economic sanctions against Moscow for its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region and support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Kerry and the United Nations envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, want to hold the next round of ISSG talks on Friday in NY, but Moscow has so far refused to confirm the date.

“Currently several of its units amounting to more than 5,000 men, as well as regular army forces, are carrying out offensive actions against terrorists in the provinces of Homs, Hama, Aleppo and Raqqa. It is not planned”, Kremlin spoke-sman Dmitry Peskov said.

The U.S. has been targeting the Islamic State group bases in Syria since September 2014 but unlike Russian Federation they do not co-ordinate their raids with the authorities in Damascus.

For its part, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement complaining that Washington was not ready to fully cooperate in the struggle against Islamic State militants and needed to rethink its policy of “dividing terrorists into good and bad ones”.

Kerry travels to Moscow from Paris, where he is attending a closed-door ministerial meeting on Syria.

Gerasimov described the offensive against IS as a joint effort by FSA and the Syrian military, though FSA has always been in opposition to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Russian Federation has consistently said Assad’s future is for the Syrian people to decide, while the US and many of its allies insist that he go, although they have softened their stance somewhat to allow Assad to play some kind of role in the transition. Turkey’s foreign minister said Ankara’s patience with Russian Federation “has a limit” after Moscow’s “exaggerated” reaction to a weekend naval incident between the two countries, an Italian newspaper reported on Monday.

“It is a little less insulting, a little less hostile, and it reflects the degree to which the so-called “isolation” of Russia simply has not worked”, Jatras said, recalling how everybody wanted to talk to the Russian leader at the recent G20 meeting in Antalya, Turkey. Syrian opposition groups, however, demand that Assad leave at the start of the process. The countries, he said, have “widely divergent perceptions of the conflict in Ukraine”.