Kerry holds Syria, Ukraine crisis talks in Moscow

As the West seeks to find a solution to the crisis in Syria, the US Secretary of State, John Kerry has arrived in Moscow for talks to try to bridge gaps with Russian Federation.

Kerry was meeting his counterpart Sergey Lavrov on Tuesday before seeing Russian President Vladimir Putin in what are expected to be hard discussions over the ways ahead in each crisis.

The United States and Moscow are are at odds over a political transition to halt the war in Syria, as well as the military approach to fighting the Islamic State. “Today, I hope we can find some common ground”.

Kerry’s meetings will determine whether a new worldwide diplomatic conference on Syria will go ahead as planned at the United Nations on Friday. President Barack Obama has seen Putin briefly twice since then at global summits in Turkey and France.

While Kerry said there were still “kinks” that needed to be worked out, mainly to do with which groups should be included in the talks, the Kremlin rejected the results of the Riyadh meeting, saying some of the groups were considered terrorists.

Syrian opposition groups have demanded that Assad leave at the start of the process, which is supposed to begin in early January, once the opposition groups have settled on a delegation to negotiate with the government. Since late September, it has been bombing terrorist and rebel targets in Syria as part of what the West says is an effort to prop up Assad’s government.

Kerry praised Moscow for having been “a significant contributor to the progress that we have been able to make” on Syria and said the USA and Russian Federation both believe the Islamic State group must be eliminated.

The US and Russian Federation have long disagreed on what role Syrian President Bashar al-Assad should play in the process.

Lavrov and Kerry will discuss the situation in Syria in the context of joint work in the International Syria Support Group, developments in Ukraine and bilateral relations.

The U.S. has been pressing its European allies to continue applying sanctions on Russian Federation because of its annexation previous year of Crimea and its support for the separatists. The sooner Russia implements a February cease-fire that calls for withdrawal of Russian forces and materiel and a release of all prisoners, he said, the sooner that “sanctions can be rolled back”.

Kerry reiterated the USA position that Assad, accused by the West of massive human rights violations and chemical weapons attacks, won’t be able to steer Syria out of more than four years of conflict.