Kerry's meeting with Putin follows a meeting last week in Riyadh
which agreed to unite a number of opposition groups excluding Islamic
State to negotiate with Damascus in Syrian peace talks.
US Secretary of State John Kerry speaks in a file photo. REUTERS/Mandel Ngan/Pool
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Moscow on Tuesday to try and narrow differences with Russian leader Vladimir Putin over the role of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in any political transition and which rebel groups should be part of peace talks.
Kerry
will seek to prepare the ground for a third round of talks of world
powers on Syria amid doubts over whether a meeting pencilled in for
Friday in New York will go ahead.
Russia's Foreign Ministry said late on Monday that Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov agreed in a phone call on the need for specific preconditions to be met before any new meeting, throwing the timing into doubt.
However, U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner said there were no preconditions to having this meeting.
Russia
is one of Assad's staunchest allies and launched a campaign of air
strikes to support his forces against insurgents on Sept. 30. It says
only the Syrian people and not external powers should decide Assad's
political fate.
Speaking before Kerry's arrival in
Moscow, a State Department official said Kerry would also raise
concerns about Russia's continued bombing of Syrian opposition forces
instead of Islamic State militants, an approach likely to anger Moscow.
Ahead
of the talks, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement
complaining that Washington was not ready to fully cooperate in the
struggle against Islamic State militants and needed to rethink its
policy of "dividing terrorists into good and bad ones."
Kerry's
meeting with Putin follows a meeting last week in Riyadh which agreed
to unite a number of opposition groups excluding Islamic State to
negotiate with Damascus in Syrian peace talks.
While
Kerry said there were still "kinks" that needed to be worked out,
mainly to do with which groups should be included in peace talks, the
Kremlin rejected the outcome of the Riyadh meeting, saying some of the
groups were considered terrorists.
Assad himself
appeared to cast doubt on the very idea of peace talks on Friday, saying
he would not negotiate with armed groups that he said were backed by
the United States and Saudi Arabia.
The opposition groups said Assad should leave power at the start of a transitional period.
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