Russia has never designed its foreign policy to "be nasty" to the United States, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday at Paris Peace Forum
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 12th November, 2019) Russia has never designed its foreign policy to "be nasty" to the United States, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday at Paris Peace Forum.
"Never ever we have been designing our foreign policy just to be nasty to the United States, not at all. If you take the Middle East, Russia is the only country which talks to everybody. Be it Syria, where we talk to the government, to the opposition, to the Kurds and to the Americans by the way," Lavrov said.
The same was true for Iraq and Libya, the Russian foreign minister added.
Lavrov recalled that Moscow and Washington came close to a deal on Syria in 2013, but it fell though because the United States failed to "separate the armed opposition from terrorists."
The Russian foreign minister added that the United States had been opposing the reconstruction effort in Syria, forbidding "all the allies � NATO, EU, the countries in the region � to invest in any project on the territory controlled by the [Syrian] government."
"But, on the other hand, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates river, they do everything to build quasi-state structures, and they ask the governments of countries to invest heavily so that they can create a local administration based on the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish YPG [People's Protection Units] and others, with a very blunt intention to separate this part of Syria and to control the oil fields there," Lavrov continued.
The Russian foreign minister remarked that Kurds had to take part in the Syrian political process, but would have to be consistent. Lavrov said that the Kurds turned to Russia after the United States decided to withdraw its forces from Syria, clearing the path for a Turkish offensive. Russia was ready to help the Kurds talk to the Syrian government, Lavrov said, but when the United States said it would be back in Syria to control the oil fields, the Kurds lost interest in the dialogue again.
