MOSCOW: After talks with Moscow’s top diplomat, Syria’s main opposition group insisted on Friday that Russia is “not clinging” to President Bashar al-Assad.

The head of Syria’s National Coalition, Khaled Khoja, met on Thursday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as part of a fresh push by Moscow to find a way out of the four-year civil war that has cost some 240,000 lives.

Moscow — one of Assad’s few remaining backers — is pushing a plan for a broader grouping than the US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State (IS) group, to include Syria’s government and its allies.

But Khoja — in Moscow for the National Coalition’s first talks there since February 2014 — reiterated that Assad must go immediately and hinted that Russia’s support for the strongman may be wavering.

“We have found that the Russian authorities are not clinging to Bashar al-Assad personally, but rather they’re clinging to the Syrian state, its territorial integrity, and the preservation of its institutions,” Khoja told journalists at a press conference.

A spokeswoman for Russia’s foreign ministry said in response that Moscow’s position remained unchanged.

“We have always said that we do not support Assad in a personal capacity but that we support the legitimately elected president of Syria,” spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told AFP.

The ministry said in a statement that Russia was pushing the National Coalition — Syria’s main opposition group in exile — to talk to other parties in the fragmented opposition about the creation of a cohesive negotiating platform for talks with the authorities.

The meeting Thursday is part of a broader diplomatic flurry that saw Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir fly into Moscow on Tuesday, on the back of a three-way Russian-Saudi-US meeting in Doha earlier this month.

The top diplomat for Saudi Arabia, a key backer of the Syrian opposition, rejected calls to work with Assad

against IS after a meeting with Lavrov.

