Top stories in the Russian press on Thursday, April 16, prepared by TASS

Izvestia: Macron’s coronavirus-inspired global truce unlikely to pan out

French President Emmanuel Macron’s bid to launch a worldwide ceasefire due to the coronavirus could be backed by some conflicting sides. However, experts believe that the pandemic is unlikely to silence the guns forever. The French leader assured that his appeal had been endorsed by three permanent UN Security Council member-states — the United States, the United Kingdom and China. While some conflicting sides, for example, the Israelis and Palestinians, are observing the so-called coronavirus ceasefire, other parties have broken the truce.

The French president’s call for a global ceasefire during the coronavirus pandemic echoes the March 23 initiative of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. The peace initiative was backed by a dozen countries, which include: Ukraine, Palestine, Afghanistan, Thailand, the Philippines, Yemen, Sudan, Cameroon and Sri Lanka, Director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo Henrik Urdal told Izvestia. The Middle East’s longest conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians has seen a pause due to the coronavirus. Both have taken a timeout in their dispute over the Jordanian Valley’s annexation and focused on their joint anti-coronavirus fight instead.

Meanwhile, the UN has voiced concerns over the growing number of casualties among civilians in the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine, where the six-year-long war has already claimed 3,500 civilian lives. The latest summit on ironing out the Ukrainian conflict was held in December 2019, resulting in a joint communique by the leaders of the Normandy Four group — Germany, Russia, Ukraine and France.

However, German political scientist Alexander Rahr in his interview with Izvestia was skeptical about the readiness of European countries to resume the Normandy Four talks soon, even in an online conference format. "Currently, the Ukrainian conflict is frozen and virtually it’s impossible to send even peacekeepers there now," Rahr noted. According to him, the West is so weak due to the coronavirus now that it is preoccupied by its own problems. So, Ukraine should understand that there is no chance to count on the West’s financial and political support. Meanwhile, this could encourage the Russian and Ukrainian leaders to resume talks on normalizing ties, namely on the economic front, the expert emphasized. "COVID-19 could offer a surprise chance for the UN Security Council’s member-states at this coming autumn’s meeting, where they will have to decide — like they once did in Yalta — on how to live in a multipolar world in the future."

Nezavisimaya Gazeta: Turkey lacks trust in Syria deal with Russia

The Erdogan regime has been flexing its muscles in Syria’s Idlib, which is still controlled by radical groups and militants loyal to Turkey. Meanwhile, some Syrian opposition media outlets claim that Ankara has been reconfiguring forces protecting the province and has been trying to integrate militants into its military units. The Turkish leadership is apparently seeking to reduce the risks of clashes with Assad’s forces in case the ceasefire is broken, Nezavisimaya Gazeta writes.

Syria’s opposition newspaper Enab Baladi wrote that the Turkish military command planned to "reset" the situation in Idlib. Its sources claim that Turkey’s brass seeks to set up a more organized army in this area, formally disbanding the current coalition of Syria’s armed opposition groups.

"The opposition’s integration into Turkey’s regular units is obviously a response to the escalation in February and March when dozens of Turkish troops died," Russian International Affairs Council expert Anton Mardasov told Nezavisimaya Gazeta. According to the expert, the key radical structure in Idlib — Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which swallowed up the rest of Jabhat al-Nusra (terror group, outlawed in Russia) — is highly likely to be reconfigured.

"Another question is that if the situation in Idlib stabilizes, HTS will find it hard to play the Damascus threat card and impose their rules on the Turks in the de-escalation zone," the pundit said. "Obviously, Turkey is trying to compensate for a major problem in its military policy in Syria — the lack of a clear strategy on boosting its presence in the buffer zones that have been resistant to the Syrian regime’s pressure," Mardasov noted. Meanwhile, Damascus is interested in engaging such influential Turkish foes in the region as the United Arab Emirates and this makes the situation even more complicated. For Russia, it’s advantageous to search for a balance between Turkey and the Persian Gulf states. Moscow is not ready to raise the stakes in talks with Ankara, he stressed.

Kommersant: Frontline focus moves from Syria to Libya

Despite a deal between the parties to the Libyan conflict on a humanitarian ceasefire due to the coronavirus pandemic, the fighting in the war-torn North African country rages on. This week, the forces of the UN-recognized Government of National Accord seized control over the coastal area between Misrata and the border with Tunisia. Against this background, there have been reports that Russia is allegedly recruiting Syrian mercenaries and deploying them to Libya in order to enhance the positions of the Libyan National Army led by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar. Moscow has declined to comment on these statements but made it clear on numerous occasions earlier that it kept a distance in the Libyan conflict.

Fayez Al-Sarraj, who leads the internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) based in Tripoli, told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that he would not sit down at the negotiating table with Haftar "after the disasters and the crimes he committed against all Libyans." He also claimed that his opponent broke all the agreements, deciding to take advantage of the coronavirus pandemic in order to attack Libya’s western regions.

According to Sarraj, "Russia claimed that Russian mercenaries in Libya were not representing Russia’s interests and were not funded by Moscow. There are Syrians, who are coming from Syria along Damascus-Benghazi flights run by Cham Wings airline, which is blacklisted by the US Treasury Department." "We don’t have any contracts with mercenaries, we signed a deal on military cooperation with Turkey in broad daylight," he said, answering a question whether Syrian mercenaries were fighting on the side of Tripoli and the Libyan National Amy.

Both the GNA controlling Tripoli and the LNA based in the east have accepted the proposal of UN chief Antonio Guterres on a humanitarian ceasefire in order to battle the coronavirus.

One of Syrian opposition’s commanders, Fateh Hasun, told Kommersant that they had information that Russia’s Wagner Group private military company, backed by Bashar Assad, recruited hundreds of young Syrians near El Kuneitra and Deir ez-Zor. According to some opposition sources, nearly 3,500 Syrian special ops will be sent to Libya under an agreement between Damascus, Haftar and Cairo. They could arrive by planes in Egypt and then be sent through the Egyptian-Libyan border. However, given the current situation in the Syrian army, it’s difficult to believe in such a large-scale agreement. It is not ruled out that these reports could serve to justify the ongoing military alliance between Tripoli and Ankara, the newspaper writes.

Media: Russia’s economy could lose nearly $240 bln over coronavirus

The total losses for Russia’s economic sectors, which are the worst-hit by the coronavirus pandemic, could reach 17.9 trillion rubles ($239 bln), while up to 15.5 mln people could lose their jobs, according to macroeconomic research by the National Rating Agency, Izvestia reports. The crisis will deal a heavy blow to the service sector, while the food industry, agriculture, fishery and forestry sectors will be the least affected. According to analysts, the government won’t let this significant damage happen and will take additional measures for ironing out this economic crisis.

In its new forecast, the National Rating Agency relies on a basic scenario, where the GDP and real wages would decline nearly 3% and the dollar rate would surge to 85-90 rubles to the US currency. Experts believe that this optimistic scenario, where economic growth would continue, and a pessimistic scenario, characterized by a deep fall, are highly unlikely.

The Russian National Wealth Fund’s reserves will be drained in the coming two years rather than in six years as the government said earlier, specialists from the Economic Expert Group, which consult with the Finance Ministry and the Ministry of Economic Development, predicted, according to Izvestia. Given the scale of the current crisis, the experts warn that the government will have to ditch the budget rule, and take out loans, while the Central Bank would have to start printing money to buy the Russian government’s securities. "The hallmark of the current situation is virtually a full lack of revenues, including in the sectors, which are the most vulnerable to shock. This creates a serious threat of an exodus of small firms from the market, which have no reserves, severing production ties, and a sharp rise in unemployment and mounting poverty," the authors of the article wrote.

Nezavisimaya Gazeta: Pentagon puts Chinese virologists under microscope

US intelligence is investigating the activity of scientific institutions in China's Wuhan to find out whether they could have been the source of the coronavirus infection. Pentagon chief Mark Esper said international inspectors could be sent to Chinese laboratories in the future. Earlier, media reports claimed that the deadly virus could have originated from experiments, carried out by Chinese scientists. Washington has jumped on the bandwagon, seeking to blame Beijing for the pandemic, Nezavisimaya Gazeta writes.

Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley explained that there was intelligence data about what happened in Wuhan in December 2019. The first evaluations suggested that the contamination was the result of a natural transmission of the pathogen from an animal to a human body. Later, some media outlets claimed that the virus leaked from the Wuhan laboratory, although there is no sufficient evidence to draw this conclusion.

"Before the epidemic started, the West had discussed the issue of whether China could have any bacteriological or chemical weapons. US publications mentioned that China did not have programs for developing these weapons. Meanwhile, there is a major research center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan, which deals with virology and has modern equipment," Senior Research Fellow at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Far Eastern Studies Vasily Kashin told the newspaper.

According to the expert, there are many theories on how this coronavirus had originated. "Nothing can be ruled out. But there is no trust in the Americans’ statements. They have done a terrible job in combating the pandemic and are trying to shift the blame to China. We should not forget that US special services had spread obvious lies several times. The most famous example is their claim about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," the expert highlighted.