BRUSSELS. Sept 30 (Interfax) - The European Union approves of Russian efforts to find a negotiated solution to the Syrian crisis, Russia's permanent envoy to the EU said on Friday.
"When Russia put forward the well-known proposals that underlie the agreements reached in Geneva on September 14, the European Union hailed them without any reservations through the lips of EU [foreign policy chief] Catherine Ashton," Vladimir Chizhov told Interfax in Brussels.
Chizhov also pointed out a speech by European Council President Herman Van Rompuy at the current UN General Assembly session in New York in which Van Rompuy expressed support for Russia's initiative for dealing with the Syrian chemical arms problem and insisted on resuming the work of organizing a new international conference on Syria.
Van Rompuy made the speech on Wednesday,
At the same time, the EU is making only a limited contribution to the Syrian crisis settlement efforts because "international efforts on Syrian affairs, besides the Russian-American bilateral track, are concentrated in the UN Security Council and in the leadership of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, bodies in which the European Union per se is not represented," Chizhov said.
"But there are more circumstances. The EU countries that are represented in the Security Council as permanent members have been taking a separate, hard line in Syrian affairs, a line that far from everyone in the EU supports. This explains the inevitable gap between the European voice as coming out, let's face it, primarily from the lips of the French representatives in the Security Council and the British representatives in it, on the one hand, and the consensus position that the EU has been able to formulate, on the other," the diplomat said.