Russia supports unification of 3 Syrian opposition groups – Lavrov

Moscow supports Saudi Arabia’s initiative to unite the three Syrian opposition platforms, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Tuesday.

Lavrov told reporters in Abu Dhabi: “when Saudi Arabia put forward the initiative to unite the High Negotiations Committee, which was once formed at a meeting in Riyadh, with the Cairo group of oppositionists and the Moscow group of oppositionists, we supported this in the most active way.

“I believe this… will contribute to the beginning of really substantial, meaningful negotiations about the future of Syria,”

“It does not matter that there has been no breakthrough…

“The main thing is that this process has begun, and the participants in this process, the Riyadh group, the Cairo and Moscow groups, agreed to continue these efforts.

“We will help our Saudi colleagues in every possible way to move in this direction,” he said.

Lavrov disagreed that the negotiations on the unification of the Syrian opposition failed.

In order to settle the long-standing political crisis in Syria, he added, the country’s opposition should stop making ultimatums that do not fall under the framework set by the UN Security Council.

“It is necessary for the opposition to behave in a realistic way and give up ultimatums that do not fall under the framework set by the UN Security Council.

“The Security Council has ruled that the fate of Syria should be decided by the Syrians themselves. There are no preliminary conditions,” Lavrov said at the press conference.

The new round talks on Syrian crisis settlement is expected to take place in Astana in September.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Tuesday he had discussed the fight against terrorism with United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Abdullah Zayed and also confirmed Moscow’s interest in coordination with Abu Dhabi on settlement of crises in Syria, Libya, Iraq and Yemen.

“Among international issues, we, of course, paid the key attention to the need for fight, uncompromising fight against all kinds of terrorists, here we have an absolutely unified position, as well as the need to suppress terrorist ideology and extremist ideology,” Lavrov said at a news conference.

He said that the foreign ministers had discussed the situation in Syria, Libya, Yemen and Iraq.

“Of course, we talked about the need to resolve the Palestinian problem. On all these issues we have identical or very close positions.

“We once again confirmed our interest in coordinating our actions on these burning issues,” Lavrov added.