Moscow hopes to hold conference on Middle East

Moscow hopes that an international conference on the Middle East will be held in the next few months already, Russian Foreign Ministry's official spokesman Alexander Yakovenko told journalists on Thursday. Moscow will take efforts to gather the conference, he stressed. According to him, "goals, agenda, time and place of the forum are being discussed between international intermediaries and interested sides." While speaking about Russia's standpoint in this issues, the diplomat said that "the international legal basis of this conference is clear - 242, 338, 1397 resolutions of the UN Security Council, 'land for peace' formula and the Saudi initiative, approved at the Arab League summit in Beirut." "The aim of the forum is to give an impulse to the process, started at the Madrid conference in 1991," Yakovenko stressed.