No amount of criticism can keep Russia away. Russia reached out to the Syrian National Coalition for Opposition and Revolutionary Forces on Friday through the Russian Embassy in Egypt and “expressed readiness to conduct a meeting,” according to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Russia, a longtime ally of Bashar al-Assad, has yet to formally recognize the group. But in another indication of a policy shift, President Vladimir Putin recently said that Russia is “not preoccupied that much with the fate of the Assad regime.”
