... that is for the Syrian people?
S.Lavrov:
Yes, that is for them to decide. I believe that this view, which was rejected for quite some time after the Syrian crisis began, is now shared by more and more countries.
Question:
When Russia withdraws from Syria? President V.Putin first raised the prospect in March 2016, he said that Russia had largely achieved her objectives there. Again, December 2017. By the end of this year can we expect Russia to be out of Syria?
S.Lavrov:
No. I do not think that this is something, which ...
... intervened in Syria and thus owned the conflict, to speak, and that was another solid argument Obama could have put out on the side of non-intervention, even if non-intervention was still the weaker overall argument. Today, Russia is heavily involved in Syria, far more than the U.S., and it is hard to imagine Putin simply pulling out and letting the situation devolve into chaos, a result that would be blamed in large part on Russia and that would hurt Putin’s prestige and his own credibility when it comes to Russia intervening anywhere. With another great ...
... his rationale was that he was worried naming the Russians and taking a strong stance against them would harm John Kerry’s then-ongoing diplomatic efforts to win cooperation with the Russians on Syria, as all recent diplomatic talks with them on Syria had been a farce. The same officials noted that Obama “fear[ed]” additional cyberattacks by Putin, additional military harassment in the Black and Baltic seas, and further aggression in Eastern Europe.
Yes, incredulously, Obama imagined that turning a blind eye to Russian interference in domestic American elections would somehow invite Russian ...
New threads in the Team Trump/Team Putin tangled web show Manafort and Page linked to each other as part of a Russian plot to control Ukraine and also show a mutual Russian mafia godfather linking them with each other and Trump, providing even deeper and more fertile ground on which to ...
... addition, Trump has put forward policies closer to the Kremlin’s policies than any other major candidate for the presidency. Notably:
Trump wants the U.S. to defer to Russia in Syria and let it “fight ISIS” there, and agreed with Putin’s backing of Syrian's murderous President Bashar al-Assad.
Trump is against the U.S. taking a large role in helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian aggression, and his campaign people also aggressively saw to it that language calling for the U.S. government ...
... though, the problems between Russia and America are serious and affect a whole host of major issues around the world from wars in Syria and Ukraine to global energy distribution, access, and prices, to space exploration and militarization, just to name a few.... ... uncommon elements in the U.S. and the West, especially among American Republicans, there is a tendency to speak of Russia and Putin today hyperbolically in the same breath as interwar Germany and Hitler, that somehow, Putin is a monster of a potential ...
... fail.
The military operation in Syria, whatever form it takes, would still aim at weakening the Assad regime to give the rebels a strategic edge. But a point which seems to be completely ignored by the Obama administration is that the opposition in Syria is not homogeneous. As Mr. Putin puts in his recent op-ed in the New York Times, "There are more than enough Al-Qaeda fighters and extremists of all stripes battling the government. The United States State Department has designated Al Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq ...
