Offer your own peace plan: Lavrov tells rebels

MOSCOW

Russia has urged the rebels to make counter-proposals to those made by President Bashar al-Assad in a recent speech to start a dialogue that could end the fighting while saying removing al-Assad from power was not part of past international agreements on the crisis and was impossible to implement.

Referring to al-Assad’s speech on Jan. 6, “President Assad came out with initiatives aimed at inviting all opposition members to dialogue. Probably they will not seem serious to some, but they are proposals,” Lavrov said. “If I were in the opposition’s shoes, I would come up with my ideas in response on how to establish a dialogue,” he added, according to Reuters.

Lavrov also said that a broader international call on al-Assad to step down was not part of international agreements on the issue and was impossible to implement because it does not depend on anyone, Agence France-Presse reported. “If you make al-Assad ouster the main precondition, the price for this approach is new fatalities.”