Zelenskiy Says Ukraine is Preparing to Resume Diplomatic Ties with Syria

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy speaks as he attends a European Union leaders summit in Brussels, Belgium, December 19, 2024. REUTERS/Johanna Geron/File Photo

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14:50-2 January 2025 AD ـ 03 Rajab 1446 AH

Asharq Al Awsat

14:50-2 January 2025 AD ـ 03 Rajab 1446 AH

Zelenskiy Says Ukraine is Preparing to Resume Diplomatic Ties with Syria

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy speaks as he attends a European Union leaders summit in Brussels, Belgium, December 19, 2024. REUTERS/Johanna Geron/File Photo

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Thursday he was preparing to re-establish diplomatic ties with Syria, less than a month after the overthrow of the Russia-backed government in Damascus.
Zelenskiy spoke after a visit to Syria by his Foreign Minister, Andrii Sybiha, and by Agriculture Minister Vitaliy Koval who said earlier Ukraine had already sent a shipment of food aid.
"We are preparing to resume diplomatic relations with Syria and cooperation in international organisations," Zelenskiy said, Reuters reported.
Ukraine cut diplomatic ties with Syria in June 2022 after the then government in Damascus said it recognized the "independence" of the Russia-occupied territories in Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
Since opposition factions overthrew Syria's President Bashar al-Assad last month, Ukraine has been moving to build ties with the new Islamist rulers there. Russia, which invaded Ukraine in 2022, was a staunch ally of Assad and has given him political asylum.
Kyiv also planned to increase trade with Lebanon and at least double its agriculture exports from $400 million, Zelenskiy added.
Zelenskiy previously said that Ukraine would send 500 metric tons of wheat flour to Syria under Kyiv's humanitarian "Grain from Ukraine" initiative in cooperation with the UN World Food Program.
The delivery would provide resources for around 167,000 Syrians for a month, Koval said in a televised interview.
He added that the shipment will not be the last and that Syria was also interested in oil, sugar and meat deliveries.
"Today, at the level of government dialogue, we clearly understand that support should be sustainable and not a one-off, but rather long-lasting and predictable," Koval said.
Moscow has also said it is in contact with the new administration in Damascus, including over the fate of Russian military facilities in Syria.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, Founder of France's Post-war Far Right, Dies Aged 96

French Far-Right Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen speaks to journalists during a news conference on the sidelines of the National Front political party summer university in Marseille, France, September 5, 2013. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier/File Photo

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15:43-7 January 2025 AD ـ 08 Rajab 1446 AH

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15:43-7 January 2025 AD ـ 08 Rajab 1446 AH

Jean-Marie Le Pen, Founder of France's Post-war Far Right, Dies Aged 96

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France's far-right National Front party who tapped into blue-collar anger over immigration and globalisation and revelled in minimising the Holocaust, died on Tuesday aged 96.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Marine Le Pen's political party, National Rally (Rassemblement National).
Jean-Marie Le Pen spent his life fighting - as a soldier in France's colonial wars, as a founder in 1972 of the National Front, for which he contested five presidential elections, or in feuds with his daughters and ex-wife, often conducted publicly.

Controversy was Le Pen's constant companion: his multiple convictions for inciting racial hatred and condoning war crimes dogged the National Front, according to Reuters.
His declaration that the Nazi gas chambers were "merely a detail" of World War Two history and that the Nazi occupation of France was "not especially inhumane" were for many people repulsive.
"If you take a book of a thousand pages on World War Two, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what one calls a detail," Le Pen said in the late 1990s, doubling down on earlier remarks.
Those comments provoked outrage, including in France, where police had rounded up thousands of Jews who were deported to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.
Commenting on Le Pen's death, President Emmanuel Macron said: "A historic figure of the far right, he played a role in the public life of our country for nearly seventy years, which is now a matter for history to judge."
Le Pen helped reset the parameters of French politics in a career spanning 40 years that, harnessing discontent over immigration and job security, in some ways heralded Donald Trump's rise to the White House.
He reached a presidential election run-off in 2002 but lost by a landslide to Jacques Chirac. Voters backed a mainstream conservative rather than bring the far right to power for the first time since Nazi collaborators ruled in the 1940s.
Le Pen was the scourge of the European Union, which he saw as a supranational project usurping the powers of nation states, tapping the kind of resentment felt by many Britons who later voted to leave the EU.
Marine Le Pen learned of her father's death during a layover in Kenya as she returned from the French overseas territory of Mayotte.
Born in Brittany in 1928, Jean-Marie Le Pen studied law in Paris in the early 1950s and had a reputation for rarely spending a night out on the town without a brawl. He joined the Foreign Legion as a paratrooper fighting in Indochina in 1953.
Le Pen campaigned to keep Algeria French, as an elected member of France's parliament and a soldier in the then French-run territory. He publicly justified the use of torture but denied using such practices himself.
After years on the periphery of French politics, his fortunes changed in 1977 when a millionaire backer bequeathed him a mansion outside Paris and 30 million francs, around 5 million euros ($5.2 million) in today's money.
The helped Le Pen further his political ambitions, despite being shunned by traditional parties.
"Lots of enemies, few friends and honor aplenty," he told a website linked to the far-right. He wrote in his memoir: "No regrets."
In 2011, Le Pen was succeeded as party chief by daughter Marine, who campaigned to shed the party's enduring image as antisemitic and rebrand it as a defender of the working class.
She has reached - and lost - two presidential election run-offs. Opinion polls make her the frontrunner in the next presidential election, due in 2027.
The rebranding did not sit well with her father, whose inflammatory statements and sniping forced her to expel him from the party.
Jean-Marie Le Pen described as a "betrayal" his daughter's decision to change the party's name in 2018 to National Rally, and said she should marry to lose her family name.
Their relationship remained difficult but he had warm words for her when Macron defeated her in 2022: "She did all she could, she did very well."

Zelenskiy Says Ukraine is Preparing to Resume Diplomatic Ties with Syria

Zelenskiy Says Ukraine is Preparing to Resume Diplomatic Ties with Syria

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Jean-Marie Le Pen, Founder of France's Post-war Far Right, Dies Aged 96

Jean-Marie Le Pen, Founder of France's Post-war Far Right, Dies Aged 96

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