Yesterday President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reiterated his desire to meet with his Russian counterpart President Vladimir Putin on November 30th at the climate summit in Paris to discuss the situation after the incident with the downed Russian aircraft. There is no response to this request from the Kremlin. But the possibility of a Paris meeting of the presidents of Russia and the United States is not excluded. As explained by the Russian presidential aide, Yuri Ushakov, the lunch on behalf of President of France Francois Hollande gives Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama the opportunity to briefly meet and talk in an ‘on the hoof’ mode.
Meanwhile, as the Professor of the Department of Foreign Policy and International Relations at Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Sergey Bolshakov, said, Barack Obama can not be considered an independent person in foreign policy: "He is strongly affected by Congress, not only by the Republican majority. The Congress is absolutely fixated on policy elements, which generally exclude Russia as one of the leading players, including in the field of regional policy. They see no place for Russia, so Obama has nothing left to lose during his second term. That is why he continues to play his primitive games. He doesn't want to deviate from the standards which he supports, due to the current situation in the US vision of the international situation.»
In this vision, according to the expert, there is no place for Assad even during the time that we have when Russia is joining this complex crisis. The most that the Americans had to do in the last few days related to the incident with the Russian military aircraft. I would say that in general they managed to distance themselves from Turkey's action. NATO gave an overall assessment and then Stoltenberg said that it was his personal viewpoint. But the Americans said that it was a matter of relations between Russia and Turkey. "
Meanwhile, in the opinion of the expert, Bashar al-Assad is not an absolutely unchangeable political figure. But the matter is that a group of people who call themselves moderate, or any other opposition, may turn out to be someone else. The entire fragile balance may be finally broken in case of the probability of a "dogfight" among extremely radicalized elements if it is time to replace Assad and start negotiations of a semi-political nature, instead of finding some other figure. "
Concerning the role of the European leaders, Bolshakov said: "Hollande is not a figure who can make a decision to join or not to join the coalition. Unfortunately, he is a weak leader, isn't he? Now he is completely under the influence of the Americans, so he would not do anything himself. For example, Angela Merkel also expressed her concerns about the fact that their mutual work means a lot. Certainly, Merkel is not Obama and she said that they should work hard despite the current crisis. For two years Merkel broke and spoiled all that we created for European and Euro-Atlantic safety, but suddenly she made a statement that she could promote a contribution to the success of the struggle against ISIS. To some extent, she didn't follow the instructions from Washington.»
On the positive nuances in the US-Russian relations, the expert said: "The Americans lifted sanctions against Rosoboronexport and allowed it to sell spare parts for Russian helicopters which operate in Afghanistan. Perhaps it was not a giant step, but it was a move towards the fact that Russia could play a role and that it could play it in a more significant way."
