LONDON (AA) - The G8 summit in Northern Ireland ended with a failure in terms of efforts to find a settlement to the Syria crisis as Russian President Vladimir Putin refused to urge Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to quit power.
In the G8 summit meeting, Russia reacted to the EU's support to lift weapons embargo on Syria, saying Russia will continue with providing weapons to the Assad regime.
The summit ended with G8 leaders calling for peace talks to be held as soon as possible to resolve the Syrian civil war, but stopped short of calling Assad to step down. Putin warned the leaders at the summit that he would not agree to anything which may imply such a call.
UK's Prime Minister David Cameron lashed out at Assad, saying the Syrian president had "blood on his hands", announcing $1.5 million in aid for the Syrian people.
"The limits and the dynamics inside the G8 are clear. After the delay of the Geneva conference, Russia's Syria policy become hard and Assad's diplomatic negotiations are still powerful. His troops at critical areas are getting stronger and this brings a diplomatic deadlock," Ziya Meral, a scholar from the Cambridge University and London-based Foreign Policy Centre, told the Anadolu Agency.
