Secretary of State John Kerry will try to reboot a ceasefire agreement in Syria with Russia during a multilateral meeting on Monday, three weeks after an airstrike on a humanitarian aid convoy brought an end to the original bilateral pact between the U.S. and Russia.
“The main focus right now … is getting a cessation of hostilities in place, particularly around Aleppo, and to get humanitarian aid delivered, which has not happened,” State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Wednesday.
That’s the same goal Kerry had when he negotiated the previous ceasefire agreement in one-on-one talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Kerry then “suspended” all bilateral talks with Russia on Syria after the talks failed. Russian diplomats will be in Lausanne, Switzerland for the meeting on Monday, but the State Department reiterated that the suspension of direct talks remains in place.
Kerry and Lavrov might talk one-on-one, but the meeting will also be attended by “other nations” that have influence over the combatants in Syria. “What they won’t talk about is advancing the cessation of hostilities in Syria on a bilateral basis,” Kirby said. “They will talk about that in a multilateral forum, but he won’t pursue that in a bilateral.”
Pressed further, Kirby allowed that it’s possible Lavrov might bring up the Syria crisis during a one-on-one encounter with Kerry. “The purpose of this meeting is to approach the cessation of hostilities from a multilateral angle, that’s the angle that the secretary is most interested in pursuing right now since we aren’t doing this bilaterally with the Russians,” he said.
“Am I going to rule out the potential for the two of them to have a conversation on the side of this meeting? Absolutely not; of course that would happen,” Kirby said. “But that doesn’t mean that U.S.-Russia, writ large, bilateral engagement on the cessation of hostilities in Syria — that that suspension is lifted.”
The White House on Wednesday also insisted that a new effort with Russia in a multilateral forum doesn’t mean the U.S. has resumed bilateral talks with Russia.
