Obama urges Russian Federation to focus attacks on IS

“I think this is a good proposal and tomorrow President Hollande will talk to us in greater detail about it. We would be ready to seriously consider the necessary measures for this”, Lavrov said in Moscow.

Islamic State has also said it downed a Russian plane on October 31 over the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, killing all 224 people on board.

As if to underscore their frustration with Moscow, Obama and Hollande played down the biggest news of the day – Turkey’s downing of a Russian warplane- and instead chided Russia for impeding progress toward a political settlement to the Syrian conflict. Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday that the Paris attacks would serve as “an extremely important wake-up call”, much like the hijackings of September 11, 2001. To this point, Obama said, Russian Federation is an “outlier” in the fight.

Calling ISIS a “scourge” that “must be defeated”, Obama said the USA stood with France after the brutal massacre in Paris.

Asked if there was any possibility that the plane was actually shot down inside Syria, Stoltenberg said: “The allied assessments that we have are consistent with the information we have from Turkey”, he told a news conference.

Hollande has been on a whirlwind tour seeking to build a coalition to crush IS in Iraq and Syria but has seen few concrete pledges so far, and his campaign has been further complicated by a diplomatic spat between Russian Federation and Turkey.

Obama and Hollande joined UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in warning against any escalation. Russia, on the other hand, has been Assad’s staunchest ally.

“Together with President Obama, today, we wanted on the occasion of that meeting first of all to share, share our determination, relentless determination, to fight terrorism everywhere and anywhere”, he said, adding there needs to be an implacable joint response.

“And next week, I will be joining (French) President (Francois) Hollande and world leaders in Paris for the global climate conference”. But the fundamental issues remain, with a disjointed and inadequate strategy for fighting Islamic State and ending the civil war in Syria a major reason for the group’s rise. Both Obama and Hollande, however, insisted that a political transition in Syria must lead to Assad’s departure. “We do not want to exclude anyone”.

Fabius said Putin agreed on the need to focus worldwide efforts against the extremist group and that France is drawing up a map of other, moderate groups, to protect them from warplanes.

“We feel more like working with him than the United States does, but we reached the conclusion that we had to”, the official said. “But for now that is not enough to cleanse Syria of rebels and terrorists and to protect Russians from possible terrorist attacks”.