Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S.

A top Syrian opposition official met Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday in a bid to reverse Moscow's refusal to back calls on President Bashar al-Assad to step down. Haytham Manna of the National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change -- Syria's second-largest anti-Assad group -- said he thought the road to peace in Syria ran through Moscow. "We have always said that a peaceful political solution goes through Moscow," Manna told Lavrov in opening remarks of their meeting at the Russian foreign ministry.

The Syrian opposition should enter into talks with the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and put together a negotiating team, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Tuesday after talks with US Secretary of State John Kerry.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov defended Tuesday a controversial bill banning homosexual propaganda, saying gays could "do their thing" without facing prosecution like during the Soviet era. "We don't discriminate (against homosexuals), but we don't want discrimination to happen in the opposite direction, when one group of people gets the right to aggressively promote their values, which are different from those of the majority, and to impose them on children."