SOCHI: Delegates on Monday arrived in Russia for peace talks aimed at ending the Syrian conflict, but hopes of progress were dimmed after the main opposition group and the Kurds said they would boycott the event.

Regime-backer Moscow has invited 1,600 people to the talks in the Black Sea resort of Sochi as part of a broader push to consolidate its influence in the Middle East and start hammering out a path to a political solution to end the seven-year war.

The aim of the Tuesday congress is to bring Syria closer to creating a post-war constitution, after two days of separate UN-backed talks in Vienna last week closed with the warring sides not even meeting face-to-face to discuss the groundwork for the document.

The Kremlin has downplayed expectations of the event, with presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov telling journalists on Monday that “breakthroughs in the task of political regulation in Syria are hardly possible.”

He added however that under-representation will not “disrupt this congress or undermine its importance,” calling the Sochi talks a “very important” step toward peace.

The Syrian Negotiation Commission (SNC), the country’s main opposition group, said following the talks in Vienna on Thursday and Friday that it would not attend the Sochi congress.

While the government will not be represented as such at the congress, President Bashar Al Assad’s ruling Baath Party and other allied movements are attending.

The SNC accused Assad and his Russian backers of continuing to rely on military might — and showing no willingness to enter into honest negotiations — as the war in which more than 340,000 people have already died approaches its seventh anniversary.

More than three dozen other Syrian rebel groups had previously said they would not come to Sochi.

And authorities from Syria’s Kurdish autonomous region said on Sunday they would not participate because of an ongoing Turkish offensive on the Kurdish enclave of Afrin.

Turkey, which supports Syrian rebels vying for Assad’s ouster, is co-sponsoring the congress along with regime-backer Iran.

Despite the boycotts, the Kremlin’s special envoy on the Syria peace process Alexander Lavrentiev told Russian news agencies that 1,500 out of 1,600 guests invited to the congress would be there.