Russia says US planes bombed Syria’s Aleppo on Wednesday, not Russian ones

Lavrov had said last week that a cease-fire will only be possible once the Syrian army retakes control of the border with Turkey to block the routes “used to smuggle supplies to terrorists”.

Ankara sees the Syrian Kurdish militia as a branch of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), but Washington argues the Kurds are key to fighting jihadist groups like IS. His peace push coincides with defence secretary Ash Carter’s attendance at a gathering in Brussels to thrash out military options with North Atlantic Treaty Organisation partners.

The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that two U.S. Air Force A-10 attack aircraft on Wednesday bombed nine targets in the city, which has been subjected to increased levels of violence in recent days.

The peace talks broke down last week in Geneva after Assad’s forces raised the pressure on rebels by encircling Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and a stronghold for the resistance. Washington officials speaking anonymously to the Associated Press painted the 1 March ceasefire proposal as an attempt by Moscow to give itself and the Syrian government three more weeks to try to crush moderate rebel groups. The U.S. has countered with a demand for an immediate truce.

Kerry was set to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Munich to host talks with a 17-nation contact group created to get the talks back on track.

Mr Kerry emphasised on Tuesday that U.S. officials “are not blind to what is happening” and said the Aleppo battle made it “much more hard to be able to come to the table and to be able to have a serious conversation”.

“We will show patience up to a point and then we’ll do what’s necessary”.

“We will approach this meeting in Munich with great hopes that this will be a telling moment”, Secretary of State Kerry said earlier this week.

A Russian spokesman said that only war planes and strike drones of the US-led coalition were seen above Aleppo.

Germany is among European countries seeking diplomatic progress after taking in more than 1 million refugees a year ago, about half of them from Syria. The closed-door consultations are scheduled for 11:30 a.m. ET (1630 GMT) on Wednesday and were jointly requested by New Zealand and Spain, backed by other Western powers. He predicted “tangible gains” in Iraq and Syria by March. “There were no Coalition airstrikes in or near Aleppo on Wednesday”, he said in an emailed statement.

Fighting today raged around Tamura, north of Aleppo city, with intense Russian air raids on several nearby villages, the Observatory said.

“For Russia, the war in Syria is about much more than Assad”, Koert Debeuf, a research fellow at the University of Oxford, told the Carnegie Europe think tank.

“For us, it’s important to stop the Russian aggression on the Syrian people”, said Salem Meslet, a Syrian opposition representative.

The Munich meeting comes amid increasing concern over Russian airstrikes in support of a Syrian ground offensive against Aleppo, which has bolstered President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and which the US and its allies fear spells death for efforts to reach a political solution to the bloody five-year civil war.

But on Wednesday, the main Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, launched an attack along with some Arab allies against the Mannagh military air base and captured it later in the day, according to a rebel commander and an opposition activist group.