US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter addressed the Russian military buildup in Syria on Thursday during a joint press conference with Colonel-General Stepan Poltorak, the Ukrainian Minister of Defense, saying the US is ready to cooperate with Russia to defeat the Islamic State (IS) terror militia as long as it was understood that the regime of President Bashar Assad would be eased out. “The United States believes that these two interests must be pursued in parallel,” Carter said. “To pursue the defeat of ISIL without, at the same time, pursuing a political transition, is to fuel the very kind of extremism that underlies ISIL, and if that’s the Russian view, that’s a logical contradiction. These ongoing discussions on Syria will not in any way take away from our strong condemnation of Russian actions in Ukraine or change our sanctions and security support in response to those destabilizing actions.”
