A key aim of this weekend's high-level meeting on Syria is to get countries that support moderate opposition groups to use their influence to work for a new ceasefire, Russia's UN ambassador says.
Vitaly Churkin said Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State John Kerry will be joined in Lausanne, Switzerland on Saturday by ministers from a small group of countries that have a lot of influence with opposition fighters.
He named Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Reports from the region said Iran and Qatar would also attend and Russian deputy foreign minister Mikhail Bogdanov told RIA Novosti news agency that Moscow wants Iraq and Egypt to participate.
Lavrov has said a major reason the September 9 ceasefire agreement that he reached with Kerry failed was the inability of the US and other countries trying to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to separate the moderate opposition groups they support from the group formerly known as the al-Nusra Front.
Following last month's collapse of the cease-fire, the Obama administration cut off diplomatic talks and US-Russian ties deteriorated sharply. The Lausanne meeting, initiated by Kerry, is the first attempt to try to find a new viable strategy to stem the violence which continues to mount in Aleppo and elsewhere.
"I don't have any particular expectations,'' Lavrov said on Friday in Moscow, putting a damper on prospects for a positive outcome. "So far, we haven't seen our partners to make any steps to get closer to fulfilling the agreements that we have.''
Churkin said Kerry and Lavrov decided "to revisit'' the format they originally discussed three years ago of meeting with a small group of countries that have close ties with moderate opposition militants instead of the 20 countries in the International Syria Support Group, or ISSG, where it was difficult to agree on specifics.
At Saturday's smaller meeting, Churkin said, "I think it will be very important to see: are they prepared to really work for a cessation of hostilities? If this time they are more responsible about it, then progress can be made,'' he said.
Churkin said Lavrov and Kerry can then "revisit the arrangements'' in the September 9 cessation of hostilities agreement.
"I think both we and the Americans believe that this is not beyond the realm of the possible, to restart those arrangements,'' Churkin said.
Churkin said that at an ISSG meeting last month on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly's ministerial meeting, Lavrov had noted "that 20 so-called moderate opposition groups said that they do not want to have a cessation of hostilities''.
He stressed that a key aim of the September 9 agreement was to make sure the ceasefire held so the United States and Russia could together go after the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State extremist group.
Churkin expressed concern at new information on Friday "that those so-called moderate groups are making new arrangements with Nusra".
