China and Russia should stop attack against Syria

St Petersburg, RUSSIA - The countries like China and Russia should use the G20 gathering as an opportunity to convince the US to give up the idea of attacking Syria because any scale of military operation is "absolutely wrong," said a famous Russia academia.

Sergei Sutyrin, head of the Department of World Economy of St Petersburg State University, said it should be a "great mistake" if the leaders will not act to stop US President Barack Obama's idea of military attack at the two-day summit, which starts in the professor's city from Thursday afternoon.

"Of course, G20 is not designed to address this type of problems. Nevertheless, since the situation is really on the edge and burning and it (military strike) is not an option from my point of view," Sutyrin said during an exclusive interview with China Daily.

He raised the point against the background that Obama may not hold bilateral talk with his Russian counterpart during the G20 summit.

Sutyrin said China and Russia should take the lead to rally other G20 countries, which are against the attack, to convince Obama, who is also expected to rally support to fight against Syria at the event.

The US has accused the Syrian government of using chemical weapons to kill its people and Obama has strongly proposed to attack the country.

Sutyrin said there should be no reason or no positive outcome of that attack, even in rather limited scale, against Syria.

He warned: "The result of any attack would be traumatic and tragic and this would move our world into a very, very shaky situation and the conflict might expand around the Middle East further."