Updated 1:59 p.m. Moscow Time
MOSCOW, October 17 (RIA Novosti) – UN envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, will meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during his visit to Moscow next Tuesday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said Friday.
“In accordance with the agreement reached in September on the sidelines of the 69th UN General Assembly in New York, Staffan de Mistura will arrive to Moscow on October 21. He is scheduled to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and we consider this meeting to be very important,” Gatilov said.
“We notice that de Mistura intends to re-launch inter-Syrian contacts and pays a lot of effort to the purpose. We hope that he will tell us his ideas allowing to re-launch the political process on Syria,” he added.
De Mistura is the successor to Lakhdar Brahimi, who replaced former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan when he resigned as Joint Special Representative of the United Nations and the League of Arab States for Syria.
Anti-government protests broke out in Syria in March 2011, leading to a civil war, which has been going on in the country for three years and claimed the lives of more than 191,000 people over a three-year period, according to the UN. The civil war forced as many as three million more to flee their homes.
Moscow has condemned the rise of terrorism in Syria, and stressed that the only way out of the crisis is to encourage all sides to the Syrian conflict to stop violence and start negotiations.
