COLOMBO, January 14. /TASS/. No final results on the settlement in Libya have been achieved at the talks in Moscow, but efforts will continue, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters at a news conference on Tuesday.
"We will push ahead with efforts in this direction, no final results have been achieved so far," he said.
Moscow is proposing piecing together actions taken by key actors to achieve settlement in Libya.
"All efforts now taken by Europeans including Germans, the French, Italians, the efforts by Libyan neighbors - Algeria, Egypt - as well as the UAE, Turkey, Qatar and Russia, we want to piece them all together so that everyone acts in one direction and urges all Libyan parties to reach agreements rather than sort things out militarily," he said.
Lavrov also said that extremists are moving from Syria’s Idlib to Libya for destabilizing the situation in the North African country.
"There are the remaining hotbeds of terrorist activity, namely in Idlib, where extremists have been losing ground," Lavrov said. "But unfortunately, if we speak about ties between Syria and Libya, they [terrorists] are largely moving to Libya in order to continue stirring the pot in that country."
Russia’s top diplomat noted that some 90% of the country’s territory is currently under control of the legitimate Syrian government and Assad’s forces have been gaining ground.
"Certainly, the task for the future is to iron out problems in northeastern Syria, which are mainly caused by illegal presence of US forces there who have been actively encouraging separatism on the right bank of the Euphrates," Lavrov said.
Lavrov emphasized that the situation in Syria is much better than in Libya because the political settlement process is underway in the Arab republic. This became possible since all parties to the conflict have a responsible approach, he explained.
On January 12, a ceasefire in Libya proposed by the Russian and Turkish Presidents Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan as part of a larger initiative to achieve peace in the country entered into force at midnight. The ceasefire’s objective is to stop hostilities between the Libyan National Army (LNA) led by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar and Fayez al-Sarraj’s Government of National Accord (GNA) sitting in Tripoli. On Monday, representatives of the parties to the conflict arrived in Moscow for talks after which GNA envoys signed a ceasefire agreement.
Haftar took a pause to study the agreement. However, later he left Moscow without putting his signature under the document, Arab media outlets reported. In the early hours of January 14, armed clashes re-erupted in south Tripoli - the target of a decisive offensive declared by Haftar in December. The LNA issued a statement declaring "readiness and determination to achieve victory."