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UN Syria envoy's last Astana meeting ends with mixed results

While the UN envoy to Syria lamented the 11th meeting of the Astana talks as a "failed possibility" to make progress, other participants felt differently about the results.
UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura attends the plenary session of Syria peace talks brokered by Iran, Russia and Turkey in Astana on November 29, 2018. (Photo by Stanislav FILIPPOV / AFP)        (Photo credit should read STANISLAV FILIPPOV/AFP/Getty Images)

The 11th round of Astana talks on Syria, held Nov. 28-29, turned out to be the shortest in the process thus far. The guarantors published a joint statement in the morning of the second day, contrary to the established tradition of doing so in the evening. The brevity of the talks clearly demonstrated that the sides had failed to achieve any significant results. In all fairness, however, few had expected a breakthrough in a round that stressed new priorities such as prisoner exchanges. 

Shortly before the meeting, at a coordination council session of the Russian-French Trianon Dialogue, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov expressed his hope that the participants “take measures needed to finish the formation of the Constitutional Committee,” which is supposed to draft a new constitution for Syria under UN auspices. Meanwhile, TASS, the Russian state news agency, reported that complex questions had been “avoided within the summit’s agenda,” and no decisions “on the de-escalation zone in Idlib and on the Constitutional Committee” were made.

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