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PARIS, October 31 (RIA Novosti)
The removal of (click here) President Bashar al-Assad from power will do nothing to end the 19-month civil war in Syria but will only escalate the violence, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday.
“It is like daydreaming to speculate on the subject, to the effect that if the [Syrian] government is overthrown everything will fall into place,” Lavrov said after a meeting with his French counterpart Laurent Fabius.
“If this is a priority for somebody, bloodshed will continue, and for quite a while, too.”
“Assad’s fate should be decided by the Syrian people,” he added.
There is no military solution to the Syrian conflict as mercenaries fighting on the side of the Syrian insurgents keep arriving in the country from neighboring states, the minister noted....
It is time for Europe to stop the Cold War with Russia. It has asked to
become a member of NATO. It is time to bring them all in from the cold.
Rather than continuing to wage war with Georgia as a member, it would
be best to bring them all into the same alliance against terrorism. The
international dialogue is wrong. It is perpetrating more extremism on
both sides of the with only an impetus to conflict.
Tartus hosts a Soviet-era naval supply and maintenance base, under
a 1971 agreement with Syria, which is still staffed by Russian naval
personnel. Tartus is the last Russian military base outside the former
Soviet Union, and its only Mediterranean fueling spot, sparing Russia’s
warships the trip back to their Black Sea bases through straits in
Turkey, a NATO member.
