MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Tillerson is currently on his visit to Russia is meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
"Because we need to comprehend the strategy of this country," Zakharova told Russia's Dozhd broadcaster when asked why Tillerson's visit was not canceled bearing in mind recent US missile strikes in Syria.
The West has accused the Syrian government of carrying out a chemical attack in Idlib province on April 4 without providing any evidence and despite Russia's call for a thorough investigation into the incident. On April 6, the United States launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the military airfield in Ash Sha’irat in response to the alleged chemical weapon use. Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem denied the government’s involvement in the Idlib incident, saying it had never used chemical weapons on either civilians or terrorists operating in the country and will never do so.
"It is not clear to us what they [the United States] will do in Syria. And not only to us. It is not clear… what they will do in the Middle East," Zakharova said.
She stressed that it was also important to clarify the position of the United States on the development of bilateral relations with Russia.
"Of course, the issue of how Washington sees the Russian-US relations is fundamentally important to us since, frankly, we have gone through different stages and I think that we need to draw certain conclusions, to do some work on mistakes," Zakharova noted.
On April 4, a chemical weapons incident in Syria's Idlib province claimed the lives of some 80 people and inflicted harm on an additional 200 civilians. The Syrian National Coalition of Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, as well as a number of Western states, accused the Syrian government troops of carrying out the attack, while Damascus refuted these allegations, with a Syrian army source telling Sputnik that the army did not possess chemical weapons.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said April 6 that groundless accusations in the chemical weapons incident in Syria's Idlib were unacceptable before the investigation into the matter had been carried out.
Earlier this year, Syrian President Bashar Assad said that the country’s government had never used weapons of mass destruction, including chemical weapons, against the Syrian people. Besides, under a Russian-US deal after the east Ghouta sarin gas incident in 2013, Damascus joined the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and agreed to destroy its stockpile under Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) oversight. In January 2016, the OPCW announced that all chemical weapons in Syria had been destroyed.
