The Turkish head of state meets his Russian counterpart in Sochi on the Black Sea. On the menu for this meeting: peace in Ukraine, but also war in Syria. Turkey wants to try to obtain the opening of negotiations for a truce, between the Russian president and the Ukrainian, Volodymyr Zelensky, if possible in Istanbul. But these efforts are complicated by Ankara’s repeated threats of a military operation in Syria, where Russian and Turkish interests collide.
Moscow has largely backed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the face of groups backed in part by Turkey. And in Tehran last month, Recep Tayyip Erdogan was clearly warned by the Russian president against any new military operations in Syria aimed at repelling Kurdish PKK fighters whom Turkey considers “terrorists”.
On the other hand, for some Turkish media, what Vladimir Putin really wants are the Bayraktar-TB2 combat drones that Ankara has supplied to Ukraine, which are very effective against Russian tanks. If a Turkish official assures that the president was joking, the spokesman of the Kremlin Dmitry Peskov for his part assured that “military and technological cooperation is always on the agenda of the two countries”.