Putin, Erdogan ‘satisfied’ with Sochi congress: Kremlin

MOSCOW: President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday expressed “satisfaction” with the results of a Syria peace congress, the Kremlin said.
“The heads of state expressed satisfaction with the results of the Congress of Syrian National Dialogue held in Sochi on Jan. 30,” the Kremlin said in a statement.
UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura said delegates had agreed to the formation of a committee to discuss the war-torn country’s post-war constitution.
The Kremlin statement said the agreements” reached at Sochi were aimed at finding a solution based on a UN Security Council’s resolution.
The presidents also spoke of the “further coordination of Russia and Turkey’s efforts to ensure the stable functioning of de-escalation zones” in Syria established by Turkey, Iran and Russia last year.
Around 1,400 delegates attended the meeting, as part of a broader push by regime-backer Moscow to consolidate its influence in the Middle East.
The conference was overshadowed by renewed fighting in northern Syria.
Opposition activists reported more airstrikes on the opposition-held Idlib province, where dozens have been killed in regime air raids this week, and Turkish troops continued their offensive on the Afrin enclave, held by a US-allied Kurdish militia which also boycotted the Russian-sponsored talks.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov nevertheless hailed the dialogue as an important step toward peace in Syria and sought to play down the opposition boycott.
“No one expected that it would be possible to bring together representatives of all groups of Syrians without exclusion,” he told reporters after the talks. “There is no big tragedy that two or three groups weren’t able to attend.”
Lavrov said the conference participants agreed to form a constitutional committee that will be based in Geneva. He said that the delegates proposed some of the committee’s members and that groups absent from the Sochi talks will be invited to name representatives.
A statement approved by the delegates said a final agreement on criteria for selecting members, the constitutional committee’s powers and its rules of procedure would be reached in Geneva under the UN aegis.
Staffan de Mistura, the UN envoy for Syria who has been leading Syrian peace talks in Geneva, said he would move quickly to set a schedule and a process for drafting the new constitution in Geneva “because Syria cannot wait.”
“All Syrians seek a safe, calm and neutral environment for a constitutional drafting to unfold,” he said in a statement. “All Syrians need a sustained cease-fire, full humanitarian access and the release (of) detainees, abductees and missing people.”
De Mistura told reporters at UN headquarters in New York late Tuesday by audio link from Sochi that he believes talks on a new constitution could achieve results because countries with influence on the government and opposition appear determined to insist that both sides engage.
Alexander Lavrentyev, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s envoy for Syria, said 1,393 delegates attended the congress. He said the Sochi organizers were aiming to help revive the UN-backed talks in Geneva, not to sidetrack them.
De Mistura said he is counting on Russia and Iran and opposition supporter Turkey to use their influence to implement the agreement they supported in Sochi, along with the UN and other influential countries.
“The devil is in the detail,” he repeated twice. “It’s going to be uphill. We all know it. But we are actually going to establish a constitutional committee.”
De Mistura said he will come up with the criteria for participants and choose a maximum of 45-50 members for the committee.
Russia, Iran and Turkey have each submitted 50 names already, but he said there will definitely be “very substantial participation” from the opposition that skipped Sochi along with regime, other opposition and independent representatives.
He refused to give a timeline.
Asked why the focus was on a new constitution ahead of a transition, de Mistura retorted: “Are we going to ignore the fact that there is an opportunity for actually having a constitutional committee that may ... write a new constitution and that will lead to possible UN-led or UN-supervised elections?"