Josh Wood
Foreign Correspondent
BEIRUT // American secretary of state John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov will return to the negotiating table on Saturday for another try at securing a truce in Syria’s civil war. The meeting in the lakeside Swiss city of Lausanne comes 12 days after Washington severed talks with Moscow because the Russian air force not only continued to participate in bombing besieged eastern Aleppo, but actually intensified activity.
The Kremlin blamed the United States for the diplomatic meltdown, citing a US air strike against Syrian government forces, a failure to separate moderate rebels from hardliners and American “hostility” towards Russia.
But the suspension in diplomacy has not cooled heads.
Faced with increasingly dire warnings about the fate of about 275,000 civilians trapped in rebel-held eastern Aleppo and the fruitlessness so far of all negotiations, the US and some of its European allies have hardened their stance toward Moscow.
The US has indicated that it is again considering some kind of military action against the Syrian government to gain leverage in peace talks and on Thursday, British foreign secretary Boris Johnson said the United Kingdom was also considering such action. Though, he noted, “We cannot do anything without the Americans.”
The US president Barack Obama has long resisted involving America in complicated overseas wars. But with fewer than 100 days left in office, that could be changing. On Thursday, the US carried out cruise missile strikes against targets in rebel-held territory in Yemen, involving the US in another complicated war it was very keen to avoid.
Russia’s foreign ministry, meanwhile, has accused the Obama administration of applying a “scorched earth tactic” to US-Russian relations and of using “lies” to portray Russia as an enemy.
Representatives of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey are expected to also be at the Lausanne meeting, but its outcome is likely to hinge on Russia and the US, the two countries that have served as the chief negotiators in the conflict so far.
The two countries enter the meeting with the same demands they had in the last round of talks: Russia wants to see the more moderate rebels separated from extremists and the US wants Russia to stop the assault on east Aleppo and allow aid to reach civilians.
Speaking to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Mr Lavrov said Russia welcomed the proposal by the United Nation’s special envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura to personally escort the estimated 900 fighters from Jabhat Fatah Al Sham – formerly Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate – out of Aleppo. However, it is unlikely the extremists would agree to such a move and even if they did, convincing Russia – which often refers even to the non-extremist Syrian opposition as “terrorists” – that the fanatics had vacated the city would be difficult.
On Friday, Mr Lavrov admitted he had “no special expectations” for Saturday’s meeting, according to Russia’s state-run Tass news agency. He added that the US and its allies had not yet taken any steps to reach a settlement.
Even if the US and Russia reach an agreement and restart the Syria peace process, many obstacles remain, particularly the willingness of the Syrian government to abide by any deal. So far, the regime has shown no desire to take peace talks seriously and has continued to promise a total victory.
Speaking to Russia's Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, Syria's president made his intentions clear: to retake all of Aleppo and use it as a "springboard" to clear his country of what he considers terrorists.
It is hardly an auspicious omen.for the new talks.
jwood@thenational.ae
