The United States and Russia got a step closer to finding common ground on Syria.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Russian President Vladimir Putin identified “a shared set of interests” in Syria that could form the basis for cooperation, the top U.S. diplomat said Tuesday.
“We had a very productive conversation on pathways forward in Syria, things that we can do together where we have a shared set of interests, how to move the political process forward,” Pompeo told reporters who accompanied him to Russia on Tuesday. “So I’m very excited about that part of the conversation.”
Pompeo was guarded about the results of that discussion, though he replied in the affirmative when asked if the two sides planned for any “concrete steps” related to the Syrian civil war, where the Russian military intervened in 2015 to prevent the overthrow of dictator Bashar Assad. He did suggest that they developed a plan to jumpstart a peace process brokered by the United Nations.
“I think we mutually now can begin to work together in a way to unlock that,” Pompeo told reporters. “I think we now have a common understanding of the places we were hung up, which I think we can work our way through.”
The U.N.-led process provides for a new Syrian constitution to be drafted by a committee comprised of delegates from the Assad regime, from the U.S.-backed opposition, and from a third group nominated by the United Nations. The negotiations over who gets to be on the constitutional committee quickly bogged down, as the warring sides worried that the constitution would be drafted by people hostile to their interests.
“[I]t is very important to finally launch the Syrian constitutional committee,” Yuri Ushakov, one of Putin’s advisers, concurred after the meeting.
That’s a different tone than Russian officials took following Pompeo’s meeting earlier in the day with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
“Our U.S. counterparts show only verbal interest in expanding cooperation and areas of common interest on Syria,” deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told reporters. “Our approaches remain fundamentally different in terms of content.”
Russia has begun airstrikes in support of an Assad regime offensive against Idlib, a refuge for Syrians who have fled the regime but also a hotbed of al Qaeda affiliates who have fought each other and Assad at different times throughout the war. A victory there would strengthen Assad’s position heading into the negotiations, but U.S. officials and aid groups fear that the offensive would be an “apocalyptic scenario” for the civilians in the region.
“We are raising this at every level with the Russians,” James Jeffrey, the State Department’s top diplomat for the Syria crisis, said last week. “Any major operation into Idlib would be a reckless escalation of the conflict.”
