During their meeting in France, US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are expected to tackle the specifics of the upcoming ‘Geneva conference 2,’ an international push to find a peaceful solution to the Syrian crisis.
So far, neither Russia nor the US has specified an exact date
for the conference. After their previous meeting, Lavrov and Kerry
announced that the conference could take place by the end of May,
but that date was later pushed back to at least mid-June, according
to diplomatic sources.
The proposed conference would be a followup to an international
meeting in Geneva last year that drafted a peace plan for
Syria.
Lavrov and Kerry will meet on Monday in France for the sixth
time since the beginning of this year, and the Syrian crisis will
once again be one of the main topics on the agenda. The main
challenges are to determine the list of participants, and to ensure
that representatives of the Syrian opposition join the talks.
Washington and Moscow have agreed that Russia will negotiate
with Damascus, Tehran and Beijing, while the US will discuss the
issue with Qatar and Saudi Arabia, RIA Novosti reported.
Lavrov has pointed to a second issue with the talks: Ensuring
that key regional players, especially Syria’s neighbors, are
present in order to broker an effective and lasting solution to the
crisis.
Damascus indicated that it is prepared to participate. Syrian
Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem said on Sunday that the
government always believed that “dialogue among the Syrian
people is the solution to this crisis,” adding that “nobody
and no force in the world that can make decisions on behalf of the
Syrian people, as they alone have the right to do that.”
Some Syrian opposition organizations expressed willingness to
send representatives to the talks. However, various Syrian rebel
factions gathered for two separate meetings in Istanbul and Madrid
last week and failed to agree to take part in the negotiations
without preconditions.
This article originally appeared on: RT