Russian Foreign Minister, Igor Ivanov, is not scheduled to attend the Egyptian Israeli-Palestinian summit, reported AFP, quoting an official.
"We have no information on this matter," a foreign ministry spokesman said when asked if Ivanov was due to travel to the Egyptian Red Sea town of Sharm el-Sheikh for a summit aimed at ending the outbreak of Middle East violence, said the agency.
US President Bill Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat announced Saturday they would hold a summit on Monday hosted by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
The breakthrough was achieved after a week of shuttle diplomacy designed to save years of direct Palestinian-Israeli negotiations from collapse.
Ivanov visited Israel this week but his proposals for peace, as he himself admitted Friday, fell flat.
Russian President Vladimir Putin then instructed Ivanov to draft new peace plans for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Meanwhile, Russia warned Saturday that it would abandon its role as a peace co-sponsor if the Sharm el-Sheikh summit failed, reported Kuwait News Agency (KUNA).
"If the Sharm el-Sheikh summit ends in failure, Russia would no longer stand as a co-sponsor of the Middle East peace process," said Dmitri Rogozin, Chief of Russian State Duma International Affairs Committee.
Rogozin's remarks came during a meeting Saturday with the ambassadors of Palestine, Syria, Oman, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco and Iraq.
Rogozin said that the United States and Israel would be responsible for any failure, according to the agency.
KUNA reported that Israel rejected the participation at the summit due to take place on Monday.
Rogozin, meanwhile, said that the United States could not be neutral and objective as to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, accusing Washington of attempting to speed up the process for "US electoral purposes."
For their part, the ambassadors suggested "setting up an authoritative international commission to investigate into the reasons behind the bloodshed and bringing international peacekeeping forces" onto the territory of the conflict," said the agency – (Several Sources)
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