Russia says ready to see Assad go in negotiated settlement

PanARMENIAN.Net - Russia said Tuesday, June 5 it was prepared to see Syrian President Bashar al-Assad leave power in a negotiated solution to 15 months of bloodshed that has claimed more than 13,000 lives, AFP reported.

Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said a day after meeting mediator Kofi Annan in Geneva that Russia would back any peaceful settlement to the crisis as long as it did not involve the use of outside force.

"We have never said or insisted that Assad necessarily had to remain in power at the end of the political process," Gatilov told the ITAR-TASS news agency in Switzerland. "This issue has to be settled by the Syrians themselves."

The comments represent one of Russia's most explicit declarations of a position first signalled by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov a day after a February 7 meeting in Damascus with Assad.

Lavrov at the time refused to explicitly back Assad and said the leadership structure of Moscow's Soviet-era ally "should be the result of agreement between the Syrians themselves."

Russia has been facing mounting pressure to back Assad's departure as a first step in a settlement that would see his inner circle assume command on an interim basis.

The option is modelled on the recent transition in Yemen and has been backed by the U.S. administration.

The New York Times has reported that U.S. President Barack Obama plans to raise the initiative when he meets Vladimir Putin for the first time since his May return to the Russian presidency at next month's G20 summit in Mexico.

Russia blocked two past UN resolutions condemning Assad out of fear that they may be used to order strikes against an ally it supplies with $1 billion in weapons per year and uses for diplomatic influence in the Middle East.