MOSCOW, March 18. /TASS/. Russian lawmakers are ready to advise their Syrian colleagues on how to organize and hold regular parliamentary elections in this country as well as send a delegation to monitor the voting, a senior Russian lawmaker said.

"You will have regular parliamentary elections this July," Konstantin Kosachev, a deputy speaker of Russia’s Federation Council (upper house of parliament, or "senate"), said at a meeting with the Syrian parliamentary delegation, which took part in monitoring the presidential election in Russia. "If you need any help from us, any consultancy from our Central Election Commission, a monitoring mission, you can count on us."

According to Kosachev, relations between Russia and Syria, as well as between their national parliaments, are "at a very high, it can even be said, the highest, level of their development in entire history."

"Exactly a year ago, we had the honor of receiving the Syrian president, Mr. Bashar Assad. Very serious agreements on the development of our bilateral relations were reached then. Most of the issues are under parliament’s control," he noted.

Apart from that, he said that today’s meeting is a good opportunity to exchange views on what is going on in the Middle East in general and in the zone of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, "in particular, on Israel’s barbaric actions against the Gaza Strip." "I am sure we have an identical vision of this," he added.