Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday that calls by unnamed members of the U.N. Security Council for the Syrian army to halt an offensive in Idlib province were designed to help Nusra Front, the RIA news agency reported.

Lavrov was cited as calling Nusra Front "a terrorist structure" and calling on Western countries to use what he said was their influence to discipline its members. If they did not, he said the group would be destroyed.