Brussels, 09/02/2016 (Agence Europe) - On Tuesday 9 February, European Council President Donald Tusk spoke out against the Russian bombing in Syria.
“Russia's actions in Syria are making an already very bad situation even worse”, he said at a press conference with Georgia's Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili. “As a direct consequence of the Russian military campaign, the murderous Assad regime is gaining ground, the moderate Syrian opposition is losing ground, and thousands more refugees are fleeing towards Turkey and Europe”, he added. Since the start of February, over 40,000 people have fled the attack of the regime's army on Aleppo - an attack supported by Russian aviation. The border between Syria and Turkey still remains closed.
In an interview on the internet site of German news magazine Spiegel, Germany's Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that “the last five years have demonstrated that military escalation by one side always provokes a response from the other”. This does not bring the end of the conflict closer, but “merely paves the way for five more years of civil war, further destruction, new waves of refugees, and it plays into the hands of the IS terrorists. No one, including Russia, can want that”, he added. According to Steinmeier, peace can only come through negotiations and “all those who are committed to the negotiating process and have assumed responsibility for it at the Security Council must help to move it forward”.
On Friday 5 February, Steinmeier's French counterpart Laurent Fabius accused the Syrian regime and Russia of torpedoing the peace negotiations (see EUROPE 11484). (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)