The war has killed as many as a half-million people, contributed to Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II, and allowed the Islamic State group to emerge as a global terror threat.
Lavrov depicted his country’s military assistance to Assad as the one positive counterweight to the chaos, saying it prevented “the collapse of the statehood and disintegration of that country under the onslaught of terrorists” and claiming it was the impetus to high-level — but for now ineffective — international attempts to resolve the conflict through diplomacy.
Lavrov also was harshly critical of the leadership of Ukraine, where fighting continues …read more
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
