kerry Lavrov
© AFPUS Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in a meeting of hands...so far. Minds, apparently, will take longer.
US Secretary of State John Kerry has said that he wants to make "real progress" in removing differences between Washington and Moscow to resolve the years-old crisis in Syria.


Comment: Kerry speaks as though there are other qualifiers of progress he is more familiar with, such as: fake progress, insincere progress, dubious progress, reverse progress..."real progress," not so much...but he wants to :-)


Kerry, who arrived in Moscow on Tuesday, made the remarks at the start of his talks with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov. "I look forward to making real progress," he said, adding "I think the world benefits when powerful nations with a long history with each other have the ability to be able to find common ground."

He said that the US and Russia have, in the past, been able to resolve any differences they had on different issues. "Even when there have been differences between us we have been able to work effectively on specific issues," he told Lavrov.


Comment: Sounds a bit like couple's counseling. (And, he also has that special quality of speaking and saying nothing.)


Kerry, who will later meet President Vladimir Putin, plans to raise concerns about Russia's continued bombing of Daesh (ISIL) targets and the fate of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, according to a State Department official. "We don't have a full meeting of the minds yet (on Assad)," the official told reporters. "We will talk about some of the details of a transition...in the hopes of narrowing the differences between us."


Comment: It is so obvious that neither President Assad, nor the Syrian people who elected him, get a say in this historic decision...according to Kerry.


Russia has been carrying out an aerial campaign against Daesh positions in Syria since late September, at the request of Assad's government.

ISIL terrorists, who were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, have claimed responsibility for the deadly attacks in France.Daesh now controls parts of Syria and Iraq. They have been engaged in crimes against humanity in the areas under their control. The US and its allies have been targeting Daesh militants in Syria since September 2014, but they have not coordinated their raids with the Damascus government.