Statement by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov after trilateral meeting with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and UN/LAS Special Envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi, Geneva, September 13, 2013

Ladies and gentlemen,
We had a very useful meeting with UN/LAS Special Envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi. As you know we are here basically to discuss the issue of chemical weapons in Syria. Now that the Assad government joined the Chemical Weapons Convention, we have to engage our professionals together with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, as we agreed with the United Nations, to design a road which would make sure that this issue is resolved quickly, professionally, as soon as practical.
But we are very glad to Lakhdar Brahimi for inviting us on this occasion to discuss a longer-term goal for Syria, namely the preparation for the conference which is called Geneva 2. The Russian Federation, the Russian President from very beginning of the Syrian conflict, have been promoting a peaceful resolution. We have firmly supported the Arab League initiative, their observers, and we supported Kofi Annan’s initiative, the UN observers. We were one of the initiators of convening Geneva 1.
Last year here, we adopted the Geneva communique, resolved almost all major players, including all P-5 countries for the region, Arab League, Turkey, European Union, United Nations. And it is very unfortunate that for a long period the Geneva communique was basically abandoned and we were not able to have endorsement of this very important document in the Security Council, as is as adopted.
Thanks to John Kerry, who after becoming Secretary of State in spite of his huge workload on Arab-Israeli conflict understood the importance of moving on Syria and doing something about this. I am very grateful for him for coming to Moscow on May 7 this year when we launched the Russian-U.S. initiative to convene a Geneva 2 conference to implement fully the Geneva communique, which means that the Syrian parties must reach mutual consent on the transitional governing organ which would command full executive authority. And the communique also says that all groups of Syrian society must be represented.
We discussed these aspects and other aspects of the preparatory work today with Lakhdar Brahimi and his team. We are very grateful to Lakhdar for his insight, for the suggestions which he made and which we will be entertaining as we move forward parallel with the work on Syrian chemical weapons.
We agreed to meet in New York in the margins of the UN General Assembly and see where we are and what the Syrian parties think about it and do about it. We hope that we will be able to be a bit more specific when we meet with you in New York.