Vienna meeting will not address Assad’s fate, insists Moscow

Russia has said that the meeting in Vienna to discuss the Syrian crisis, scheduled to be held on Saturday, will not address the fate of President Bashar Al-Assad. A spokesperson for the foreign ministry in Moscow added that the Syrian opposition had rejected Russia’s plan for Syria, which called for holding elections after constitutional reform.

Maria Zakharova told the weekly ministry press conference yesterday that the future of the Syrian president is not the first step to resolving the Syrian issue. She insisted that it will not be discussed during Saturday’s meeting.

Asked about the killing of hundreds of thousands of Syrians by the Assad regime, Zakharova said that Moscow has never considered him as the ideal president, and that she has criticised his actions many times.

According to Western sources, however, the Vienna meeting will not focus on Russia’s plan for the Syrian crisis, which consists of eight points and a call for organising elections after a constitutional reform process lasting 18 months. Western diplomats believe that the Russian plan, proposed about two weeks ago, does not clarify Assad’s fate and therefore it cannot be a basis for discussions.

Syrian opposition figures rejected the Russian plan, stating that Moscow’s goal is to keep Assad in power and marginalise their voices. The representative of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces, Monzer Akbik, told Reuters, “The Syrian people have never accepted the dictatorship of Assad and they will not accept that it is reintroduced or reformulated in another way.”

Vienna is hosting a new ministerial meeting about the Syrian crisis on Saturday, to be attended by Russia, the US and other global powers; it comes after the failure of the meeting held on 30 October to determine the fate of the Syrian president. This is a main sticking point within the international community as efforts continue to find a solution to the conflict that has killed more than 250,000 people since March 2011.