Russia, U.S. To Discuss Syria Next Week

@AFP

MOSCOW (AFP) – Top Russian and U.S. officials will meet in The Hague next week to discuss preparations for a long-delayed international peace conference on Syria, Russia’s deputy foreign minister said on Monday.

“This meeting will take place in the middle of next week in The Hague,” Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov told the Interfax news agency.

The meeting will also involve Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN-Arab League envoy on the crisis, an unnamed Russian diplomatic source separately told news agency ITAR-TASS.

Neither Gatilov nor the diplomatic source disclosed which Russian and U.S. officials would be meeting, nor the exact date of the talks.

Moscow and Washington agreed in May to conduct the so-called Geneva 2 talks, which aim to bring together President Bashar al-Assad’s allies and the opposition for the first time after two-and-a-half years of conflict.

Gatilov said last week that the Geneva 2 meeting itself would probably not happen until October at the earliest because of a busy diplomatic schedule in September that includes UN meetings in New York.

The negotiations are based on the results of a Syria peace conference held in Geneva in June 2012, when world powers agreed on the need to establish a transition government in the war-torn country.

But the different sides then failed to agree on whether Assad could play a role in forming the new government, and if his closest representatives could serve on the new interim team.

That failure and the conference’s inability to halt the fighting on the ground meant that the peace terms were never enforced.

Advertising

Start your day with National Memo Newsletter

Know first.

The opinions that matter. Delivered to your inbox every morning

Narcissist Trump Disdained The Wounded And Admired The War Criminal

Former President Donald Trump, Gen. Mark Milley and former Vice President Mike Pence

We’ve long known who Donald Trump is: narcissistic, impressed with authoritarian displays, contemptuous of anyone he sees as low status, a man for whom the highest principle is his own self-interest. It’s still shocking to read new accounts of the moments where he’s most willing to come out and show all that, to not even pretend to be anything but what he is—and holy crap, does The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg have the goods in his new profile of outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark Milley, which focuses on Milley’s efforts to protect the military as a nonpartisan institution under Trump.

Keep reading...Show less
Ben Wikler

Ben Wikler

White House

From Alabama Republicans' blatantly discriminatory congressional map, to the Wisconsin GOP's ousting of a the states' top election official and attempt to impeach a liberal Supreme Court justice, to North Carolina's decision to allow the majority-Republican legislature to appoint state and local election board members, News from the States reports these anti-democratic moves have all recently "generated national headlines" and stoked fears ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

Keep reading...Show less
{{ post.roar_specific_data.api_data.analytics }}