Moscow Would Like UN to Help Establish Dialogue Between Syrian Delegations

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said Tuesday that Moscow would like to see the support of the UN special envoy for Syria de Mistura team to establish a dialogue between warring parties in Syria.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Russia would like to enlist the support of the United Nations in establishing direct dialogue between Syrian delegations and the establishment of one delegation from the opposition, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said Tuesday.

"We believe that of course it would be very important, and in this case we would like to enlist the support of the [UN special envoy for Syria] de Mistura team, to establish direct dialogue between the Syrian parties. It would also naturally be very important to establish one delegation of the Syrian opposition on the basis of representatives of the Moscow, Cairo and Riyadh platforms," Bogdanov said after talks with Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Jaberi Ansari.

The civil war in Syria between the government and various opposition and terror groups has been raging since 2011. The international community has taken a number of steps aimed at the settlement of the crisis, including via different formats of talks, in particular, in Geneva and Astana.

During the first rounds of the talks in Geneva the three participating groups of Syrian opposition – Riyadh-backed High Negotiation Committee, the Moscow platform and the Cairo platform – refused to even recognize each other’s right to exist and to be called an opposition force. The seventh round of intra-Syrian talks in Geneva in mid-July has managed to put three participating groups of Syrian opposition as close to the creation of a single, unified delegation as never before, as they not only participated jointly in technical meetings with UN experts, but also had daily intra-opposition meetings, sometimes twice a day, to work out a common position.

The next round of the Geneva talks, most possibly, will take place in September, following a new high-level meeting on Syria in Astana during the last week of August, and they may become the first-ever round of direct talks between the Syrian sides, given the opposition platforms’ determination to unite.