RIA Novosti: Preview: Lavrov, Kerry to Talk Ukraine, Syria in Paris
MOSCOW, June 5 (RIA Novosti) – Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his US counterpart, John Kerry, are due to meet in Paris on Thursday to discuss Syria and Ukraine, two countries that both have recently held presidential ballots amid what is largely described as a civil war.
The two foreign policy officials have a long history of talks, having held rounds after rounds of meetings to broker the Syrian settlement and later to press the government in Damascus to hand over the country’s chemical arms stockpile.
US State Department Spokeswoman Jen Psaki earlier confirmed that Lavrov and Kerry would meet in Paris on the sidelines of D-Day commemorations to mark Allies’ historic landing in Normandy during World War II.
“The focus of the discussion will be on Ukraine, given the upcoming inauguration [of President-elect Petro Poroshenko] on Saturday, as well as on Syria and the continuing work on the removal of chemical weapons [from the country],” Psaki told journalists earlier, as quoted by Reuters.
Although hundreds of miles apart, Syria and Ukraine have been through a similar kind of crisis in the past few months, with both countries holding controversial presidential elections amid increasingly bloody conflicts in a bid to bridge the deepening chasm between the conflicting sides.
Washington was quick to call the vote in Ukraine free and transparent prior to the election on May 25. On Wednesday, Kerry met with Ukraine’s billionaire candy-maker Poroshenko ahead of US President Barack Obama in Poland to congratulate him on the victory.
“He won everywhere, and clearly has been given a mandate to try to lead the country into a new era,” Associated Press cited Kerry as saying in Warsaw.
At the same time, Kerry on Wednesday called a similar vote in Syria on June 3 “a non-election” during his speech in neighboring Lebanon. He ridiculed the election saying it was “meaningless” since “you can’t have an election where millions of your people don’t even have the ability to vote, where they don’t have the ability to contest the election, and they have no choice.”
According to BBC, delegations of 30 other countries, including Russia and Venezuela, issued a statement in support of the free and transparent Syrian election, with Russian observers saying it was in line with international standards.
Meanwhile, millions in Ukraine’s southeast were not able to vote due to the government’s ongoing crackdown on opposition forces that Moscow condemned as a punitive operation against the Ukrainian people.
“The same people who say that the Syrian presidential election without a constitutional reform will be illegitimate […] are accepting the legitimacy of 25 May presidential election in Ukraine without any constitutional reform,” Lavrov said earlier in an interview with RT TV channel.
A week ago, Lavrov and Kerry discussed the Ukrainian crisis in a phone conversation where the Russian minister urged an immediate stop to bloodshed in Donetsk and Luhansk regions and emphasized the needs for a nationwide dialogue to resolve the Ukrainian standoff.
Now the US and Russian foreign policy chiefs are poised to meet in France to look at the two crises and discuss Damascus’s effort to destroy its chemical arsenal as part of last year’s deal reached under the auspices of a United Nation’s weapons watchdog to put Syria on the path towards national reconciliation.
[featured image is file photo]