A court in the city of Tyumen found the blogger, Alexei Kungurov, guilty for public "justification of terrorism" for a blog post he wrote on the LiveJournal social networking service, dedicated to the Russian campaign in Syria, reported Russia's Novaya Gazeta daily. He was sentenced to two and a half years in a penal colony settlement.

Earlier, a family friend, Maxim Karpikov, told Novaya Gazeta about the verdict.

Kungurov is a known political activist in the Tyumen region, who also …

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the negotiations of Russia, Turkey and Iran the most effective format to resolve the conflict in Syria. Other formats are not effective, he stated after attending the trilateral negotiations in Moscow.

"I believe, the most effective format is the one which you may see today. It is not an attempt to cast doubt on the efforts of other partners to make progress settling the Syrian crisis. It’s just a statement of fact,” Lavrov said at a press …

On the 20th of December, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, stated after a meeting with his Turkish and Iranian counterparts, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu and Javad Zarif, in Moscow, that Russia, Turkey, and Iran are ready to contribute to the establishment of an agreement between the Syrian authorities and the opposition, and become its guarantors.

The three countries favored the expansion of the ceasefire throughout Syria, with the exception of the areas controlled by terrorist …