Hollande to Discuss Syria with Kerry and Hague Monday

French President Francois Hollande will meet Monday with Britain's top diplomat William Hague and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for talks on the Syria crisis, the presidency said Sunday.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius will also be present at the meeting, which will take place at 0745 GMT, and he will then hold a working lunch with his British and U.S. counterparts, it added.

The meeting comes after the United States and Russia announced an ambitious deal this weekend to dismantle and destroy Syria's chemical arms stockpile by mid-2014, temporarily averting the threat of military strikes.

France's Socialist government had unequivocally backed military action in Syria to punish President Bashar Assad's regime for a deadly poison gas attack on August 21 it blames on Damascus.

And while Paris has welcomed the plan that Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov hammered out over three days of talks in Geneva, it is still determined that Assad be tried for war crimes.