WASHINGTON: After five years of bloodshed and more than a quarter of a million dead in Syria, US Secretary of State John Kerry is once more going to meet his Russian counterpart to secure a peace plan.
And he doesn’t appear to have a Plan B.
Moscow says Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will talk again in Geneva on Thursday — US officials say only that they hope to meet “very soon.”
But their last meeting was only on Monday and this trip will just be the latest in a series to Moscow, Vienna and Geneva since Russia’s military intervened in Syria last year.
Washington hopes Russian President Vladimir Putin will back a deal to restore the ceasefire that the UN Security Council had already endorsed in February, only for it to fall apart.
But critics of US President Barack Obama’s administration say Kerry has gone into the negotiation with little in the way of leverage, giving Moscow the upper hand.
“It’s a very simple situation,” James Jeffrey, a former senior diplomat and deputy national security advisor to president George W. Bush, told AFP. “As Kerry has often said, he needs a Plan B. He was never given a Plan B by the president,” said Jeffrey, now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. —Agencies
