Kremlin says concerned by Turkey shelling Syrian territory

Moscow pledged Saturday to continue backing the Syrian government in its fight against “terrorism”, dashing hopes for a ceasefire the opposition said it would only back if the regime and its supporters hold fire.

Russian Federation finds Turkish border fire “unacceptable”, the Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Saturday, after Moscow’s diplomatic push to condemn the strikes failed at the UN.

The latest decision follows a series of meetings among stakeholders to the Syrian conflict, including the February 11 International Syria Support Group (ISSG) that adopted a communique calling for a cessation hostilities and swift humanitarian access to all besieged areas.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State John Kerry had a telephone conversation on Saturday to note progress in the delivery of humanitarian supplies to Syria and confirmed that the implementation of the Munich accords for a settlement in Syria required coordination by the two countries’ military.

A Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) fighter walks near a wall, which activists said was put up by Turkish authorities, on the Syria-Turkish border in the western countryside of Ras al-Ain, Syria January 29, 2016.

Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister called on the global community to give Syrian rebels surface-to-air missiles to “change the balance of power on the ground” to “neutralise” helicopters and aircraft which have been bombing them.

“Therefore we of course would like that Bashar al Assad should take account of that”.

The main Syrian opposition group says it is ready “in principle” to implement a truce.

“We can negotiate with those Syrians, with those patriotic Syrians who are related to their country, but we cannot negotiate with the terrorists”, Assad said.

The High Negotiations Committee, which joins various armed groups and Syria’s exiled political opposition, said the United Nations must guarantee “holding Russian Federation and Iran and sectarian militias … to a halt to fighting”.

Russian Federation says its strikes target “terrorists”, but the opposition and its backers accuse Moscow of focusing on moderate and religious hardline rebels rather than extremists such as ISIL, which controls large pasts of eastern Syria.

However, the USA and French ambassadors to the United Nations both said that the Russian draft resolution had no future ahead of the closed-door session, Reuters reported.

The group has been on the offensive near the Turkish border, seizing territory from Turkey-backed Syrian rebels as well as the extremist Islamic State group.

The talks, which collapsed earlier this month in Geneva, were scheduled to resume on Thursday, but the UN’s envoy on Syria has already acknowledged that date is no longer “realistically” possible.

Meanwhile, US President Barack Obama has called on Turkey and Kurdish YPG forces to show “reciporcal restraint” in northern Syria.

Turkey has been firing artillery rounds into Syria’s northern Aleppo province for the past week, in a bid to stem the advances of a Kurdish-led coalition that has seized territory from rebels.