The UN Security Council on Saturday unanimously adopted a resolution that supports the Russian-Turkish peace initiative for Syria, which includes maintaining the recently declared ceasefire and projected talks in the capital of Kazakhstan, Astana.

The resolution could be the very breakthrough sought by the war-weary Syrians and by the assorted foreign sponsors and supporters of the Syrian war and, later, “peace process”, all involved in it for some objective or another.

The text “welcomes and supports the efforts by Russia and Turkey to end violence in Syria and jumpstart a political process”, badly needed to put an end to a war for which a heavy price was paid in terms of human life — over 300,000 dead, according to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights — and widespread destruction.

The US is absent from the Russian-Turkish initiative, having preferred to marginalise itself on the issue, but its representative at the UN Security Council welcomed Moscow and Ankara’s effort to bring an end to the war in Syria and called the truce “positive”.

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