"We can have different assessments of certain political figures, but this is not a reason to launch an intervention or set a country on fire from the inside! Now the country is engaged in a civil war, everyone fights each other — Shiites versus Sunnis, Sunnis versus Druzes, Christians, Alawites. Who wins from it? Maybe [Syrian President Bashar] Assad is not an ideal of democracy, but it was necessary to ensure that the elections were held there, not to unleash such a tough campaign. As a result, everyone suffers," Medvedev said in an interview with Germany's Handelsblatt newspaper ahead of his Munich visit.
Medvedev branded the developments in Syria a lesson of "how easy it is to create a problem and how difficult to solve it afterwards."
Syria has been in a state of civil war since 2011, with the army loyal to President Bashar Assad fighting several opposition factions and extremists.