MOSCOW (Sputnik) — On Thursday, Putin reiterated his call on the international community to create a joint counterterrorism effort, based on international law, during his state of the nation address.
"The Russian position [in the Middle East] is one of the few which is consistent and serious <… >I think that Putin is absolutely right to call for such unity, whether it can be achieved, however, is a matter of question," Richard Sakwa, professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent, told Sputnik.
Orazio Gnerre, leader of the European Communitarianist Party, said that Russia’s approach to the war on terror differs from the course pursued by the West.
The Western approach is a "war against independent nations," as opposed to the strategy of having "a coalition of countries to whose head is Russia that took to the field to safeguard the sovereignty of states and peoples," Gnerre said.
According to Gnerre, Putin wants the international community to understand that "there is no more operating space within the plans of destabilization of unipolarity, and the promotion of non-conventional means of warfare of the new kind of world war sooner or later could backfire on the European states."
A US-led international coalition has been conducting airstrikes against the Islamic State (IS, or Daesh in Arabic) extremist group, which is prohibited in Russia and many other countries, in Iraq and Syria since 2014 without the approval of the UN Security Council or the Syrian government.
Russia launched its own air campaign against Daesh in Syria on September 30, following a request from Damascus.
