RussianMissionGeneva @mission_russian
# Russian Foreign Minister Sergey # Lavrov at the limited attendance ministerial meeting on # Syria in # Lausanne
Evidently, Washington needs Moscow to pursue its interests in Syria, as its zig-zagging caprice suggests.
While the diplomats were enjoying five-star hotel comforts, Syrian and Russian forces pushed on with the task of winning the nearly six-year war. The Syrian army reportedly made major advances on eastern Aleppo this weekend, winning control of important central districts which will further loosen the siege by the militants.
UN special envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, has said that eastern Aleppo will be destroyed by Christmas. This is just a pejorative way of saying the whole city will have been liberated by the Syrian army and allied Russian forces.
The situation facing the foreign-backed militants is critical. If they are vanquished in Syria, then that spells the end of the entire Syrian conflict, which has been a US-led covert war for regime change against a strategic Russian ally.
That seems to be why Washington and its allies have become so angst-driven since the ceasefire broke down. They are trying to salvage their regime-change project in Syria, which Russia's military intervention at the end of last year largely reversed.
The almost-hysterical denunciations issued by Washington, London and Paris over alleged "war crimes" have got nothing to do with concern for humanitarian suffering. The real, unspoken and only concern is that the foreign-backed mercenary army in Syria is facing a pivotal defeat in Aleppo.
No doubt Kerry still clings to the vain hope that he can somehow get Moscow to influence the Syrian government of President Bashar al Assad. In particular, to get Syria to ground its air force and unilaterally halt its military campaign for "humanitarian reasons."
Russia is having none of it. This weekend Lavrov emphasized that the lodestar for any ceasefire to be feasible depends on militant groups dissociating from proscribed terrorist organizations. The failure to make any separation was the main reason why the ceasefire collapsed last month.
Russia is right to insist on this. Because the lack of any putative separation of militants into so-called "moderates" and "extremists" proves the argument that the Syrian conflict has been driven by illegally armed insurgents. In short, a terrorist proxy army.
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