UN envoy to convene next Geneva meeting on Syria in January

MOSCOW, Dec. 21 (Xinhua) -- United Nations (UN) Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura said Thursday that he plans to convene the 9th round of intra-Syrian talks in Geneva in the second half of January.

The special envoy made the announcement at a press conference here after talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

He said the new round of Geneva talks will concentrate on ways to fully implement the Resolution 2254 of the UN Security Council adopted in December 2015, which underlines the necessity to prepare for the constitution and organize elections in Syria.

He said he expected help from all parties involved, including Russia, to make the upcoming talks "more successful" than the previous round, which ended earlier this month with nothing significant achieved.

He added that from Moscow he will fly to the Kazakh capital of Astana, where the 8th round of Russia-led international negotiations on Syrian settlement is underway.

At the press conference, Lavrov said he hoped the Astana meeting will produce a list of participants in a Syrian national dialogue congress to be held in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi early next year. Enditem