Three things stand out in the respective readouts on the phone conversation between US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. One, they do not contradict each other in content, while the Russian readout is a more detailed version.
Russian military officials say Moscow is close to reaching an agreement with Washington on how to coordinate fight against militants in Syria’s war-ravaged city of Aleppo.
There are clear signs that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is leaving the anti-Russian coalition and will no longer be an obstacle to the US-Russian cooperation in Syria championed by Secretary of State John Kerry and his counterparts, Professor Stephen F. Cohen notes.
MOSCOW, February 28. /TASS/. Many Americans regard the ceasefire in Syria as a defeat, Chairman of the State Duma committee for foreign affairs Alexey Pushkov said.
The meeting of the International Syria Support Group seems to have marked the takeover of the Syrian situation by the White House, to the detriment of the « neo-conservatives » and the « liberal hawks ». The final declaration imposes supervision of the UNO by the US and Russia, which removes Jeffrey Feltman from his prerogatives. It imposes free circulation of humanitarian aid and the end of hostilities. The formula chosen legitimises Russian military action, not only against the al-Nusra Front and Daesh, but also against Ahrar el-Sham and Jaysh el-Islam. However, the declaration does not mention the Franco-British project for the creation of a pseudo-Kurdistan.
The US President Barack Obama sprang a New Year surprise on his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin by telephoning him Wednesday night. It was a double surprise since the Russian New Year Holiday Week is ending on Thursday, January 14, and Obama rarely makes such gestures; and, secondly, the call signified a virtual U-turn just a day after the US president had made some unfriendly remarks about the Kremlin’s policies and caricatured Russia as undermining the international system.
“The West sees ahead a crucial juncture in post-Cold War era for countering what it perceives as Moscow’s strategm to pit Eurasian integration against European integration.
Moscow maintains that the two integration processes can co-habitate and can have overlapping geo-strategic space, but Europe rejects that notion, which it equates as acquiescence with Russian hegemony in Eurasia.”
Ukraine is on the boil. The anti-government protests have become confrontational and have drawn blood in the past few days. President Viktor Yanukovich has been so far insisting that a change of leadership is possible only through the presidential election scheduled for March 2015, but that stance has come under growing pressure.
Fall-out from the US-Russian entente over Syria will be coming thick and fast. Firstly, of course, from that unhappy band, the Syrian “rebels” now in despair over Obama’s “useless procrastination”.
BEIRUT: Syria’s main opposition group denounced as a “political manoeuvre” a Russian plan to head off threatened punitive US airstrikes on Syria by destroying the regime’s chemical weapons.
The best outcome of the ‘2 plus 2′ — foreign ministers plus defence ministers — Russian-American meeting in Washington on Friday could be, arguably, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s disclosure that the US side “confirmed” at the meeting that President Barack Obama did not cancel but merely postponed his ‘bilateral’ with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, which was expected to take place in Moscow early September during his Russia visit in connection with the G20 at St.Petersburg.
The foreplay of Russian-American high-level exchanges can be very revealing. This time too the two sides indulged in some robust shadow play in the run-up to the overnight “working visit” of the United States Secretary of State John Kerry to Moscow on Tuesday.