UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will send his Syria peace negotiator to a conference in Russia next week, a spokesman said yesterday, despite the Syrian opposition's boycott of the meeting.
Guterres "is confident that the congress in Sochi will be an important contribution" to reviving the peace talks held under UN auspices in Geneva, a UN spokesman said in a statement.
Russia had long sought UN participation in the conference opening tomorrow in the Black Sea resort of Sochi to lend credibility to its diplomatic efforts to end the six-year war.
Hours earlier, UN envoy Staffan de Mistura ended a ninth round of UN-sponsored talks in Vienna, with no sign of progress toward a peace deal.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric indicated that Guterres had received assurances that the Sochi conference would not seek to sideline the UN talks.
Russia has invited more than 1,500 delegates to the two-day conference that the West views with suspicion.
In Vienna, the Syrian Negotiations Commission (SNC) announced it would not be attending the Sochi conference.
The main opposition coalition fears that Russia will push a peace deal that will keep President Bashar al-Assad's authority intact after six years of bloodshed.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said he stands by his claim that Russia bears responsibility for recent chemical attacks in Syria, despite strong denials from Moscow.
"These are just unacceptable deployments of chemicals in ways that violate all conventions which Russia itself has signed up for. It violates agreements that Russia undertook to be responsible for identifying and eliminating the chemical weapons inside of Syria," Tillerson said during a visit to Warsaw.
Tillerson first made the accusations on Tuesday, as diplomats from 29 countries met in Paris to push for sanctions and criminal charges against the perpetrators of the chemical attacks in Syria.
