Russia's President Vladimir Putin will host a trilateral summit with his Iranian and Turkish counterparts in the Russian Black Sea city of Sochi.

Thursday's meeting between Putin, Iran's Hassan Rouhani and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan will focus on the long-term settlement of the Syrian crisis, the Kremlin said in a statement on Monday.

But the three leaders will also discuss projects and coordination on the international arena. On the sidelines of the summit, the trio will hold individual meetings, according to the Kremlin.

The summit is the fourth of its kind since Putin, Rouhani and Erdogan first met in Sochi in 2017.

The three states refer to themselves as "guarantor countries", claiming they fight for securing peace in Syria. In December 2016, they brokered a ceasefire, setting up the so-called "de-escalation zones" in the war-torn country.

The Syria talks run in parallel to the Geneva talks organised by the United Nations.

But Russia distrusts the negotiations organised by the West. On Wednesday, Russia stayed away from a Middle East conference organised by the United States in Poland, a NATO member.

The Russian foreign ministry said in comments carried by the Russian news agency Interfax that Moscow views with concern "US attempts to impose unilateral geopolitical interests through initiatives presented as opinions of the entire international community".

Iran also criticised the US for seeking the withdrawal of the Iranian military out of Syria.

"The conspiracy of major states like the US will not affect our policies," Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said in comments carried by Russian state news agency, TASS.

Defence ministers meet

Thursday's Sochi talks were preceded by a meeting between Russia's Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and his Turkish counterpart Hulusi Akar in the Turkish capital Ankara on Monday.

Shoigu and Akar said they needed to coordinate their next moves on Syria, solving a few remaining issues ahead of Thursday's summit.

Russia and Turkey share a strong opposition to the US military presence in Syria and are coordinating ahead of the planned withdrawal of Washington's troops.

Iran and Russia are close allies of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, while Turkey supports the opposition.

Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman of Russia's foreign ministry, said last week that Russia demanded Turkey do more to tackle rebel fighters in Syria's Idlib province and fulfil promises it made as part of a deal with Moscow last year.

Turkey and Russia brokered a deal in September to create a demilitarised zone in the northwest Idlib region that would be evacuated of all heavy weapons and opposition fighters.

The deal helped avert a government assault on the area, the last major bastion of Assad's opponents.

Speaking at a news conference in Moscow, Zakharova said the situation there was rapidly deteriorating and that rebels were trying to seize control of the entire de-escalation zone.

"Given the extremely difficult situation in the Idlib de-escalation zone, we expect our Turkish partners to activate their efforts to ultimately turn the tide and to fully carry out the obligations they took upon themselves," Zakharova was quoted as saying by the foreign ministry.</s>Leaders from Russia, Turkey and Iran have descended on the Black Sea city of Sochi to discuss ways of ending Syria’s near-eight-year civil war. Meanwhile, hostile talk is emerging from a meeting of the US and its allies in Warsaw.

Ahead of the talks, the Kremlin said the purpose of the convention would be to discuss potential “joint steps” that can be taken to bring about a “long-term settlement” in the war-torn country.

In addition to the joint forum, President Vladimir Putin is also holding separate talks with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Iran’s Hassan Rouhani.

Speaking at the start of his meeting with Putin, President Erdogan said there was still uncertainty over Washington’s plan to remove troops stationed with Kurdish forces in northern Syria. However, he added that Turkey was willing to move ahead with coordinating a possible ‘safe zone’ with Russia.

Both Iran and Russia have been key allies in helping the Syrian government to defeat Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS). NATO-member Turkey also has a keen interest in Syria. In 2016, Turkish-backed Syrian militias seized two border crossings and now control a strip of Syrian land as deep as 30km. The grab was considered a bid to contain the Kurdish militias of the YPG, a group seen as terrorists by Erdogan, preventing them from expanding further along the Turkish-Syrian border.

The Sochi summit comes as countries allied to the US are in the Polish capital for two days of meetings. Organized under a similar theme of bringing “peace and stability to the Middle East,” the talks have been seen as a way for US President Donald Trump to drum up support among European and Arab allies for further action on Iran.

Meanwhile, the Israeli leader has been even more blunt. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel and Arab countries are in talks “in order to advance the common interest of war with Iran,” although the translation from Hebrew was later downgraded to “struggle.”

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to RT newsletter to get stories the mainstream media won’t tell you.</s>Leaders from Russia, Turkey and Iran have descended on the Black Sea city of Sochi to discuss ways of ending Syria's near-eight-year civil war. Meanwhile, hostile talk is emerging from a meeting of the US and its allies in Warsaw.In addition to the joint forum, President Vladimir Putin is also holding separate talks with Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Iran's Hassan Rouhani.Speaking at the start of his meeting with Putin, President Erdogan said there was still uncertainty over Washington's plan to remove troops stationed with Kurdish forces in northern Syria. However, he added that Turkey was willing to move ahead with coordinating a possible 'safe zone' with Russia.Both Iran and Russia have been key allies in helping the Syrian government to defeat Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS). NATO-member Turkey also has a keen interest in Syria. In 2016, Turkish-backed Syrian militias seized two border crossings and now control a strip of Syrian land as deep as 30km. The grab was considered a bid to contain the Kurdish militias of the YPG, a group seen as terrorists by Erdogan, preventing them from expanding further along the Turkish-Syrian border.Meanwhile, the Israeli leader has been even more blunt . Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel and Arab countries are in talks "in order to advance the common interest of war with Iran," although the translation from Hebrew was later downgraded to "struggle."</s>SOCHI, RUSSIA (AFP) - The leaders of Russia, Turkey and Iran met for talks on Thursday (Feb 14) on how to work more closely together in Syria as Washington prepares to withdraw its troops from the war-torn country.

President Vladimir Putin hosted Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Iran's Hassan Rouhani for the talks in the southern city of Sochi.

Russia and Iran - who both back the regime of President Bashar al-Assad - and rebel supporter Turkey have positioned themselves as the key foreign players in Syria's long-running war.

The eight-year conflict has left more than 360,000 dead.

Meeting Erdogan ahead of the summit, Putin said he was confident the talks would give a "new impulse" to efforts to resolve the conflict.

"We have done a lot together, we have come a long way," Putin said.

The talks came as Kurdish-led forces battled to expel Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militant group fighters from the small town of Baghouz in eastern Syria, the last bastion of their "caliphate" that once controlled large parts of the country.

A US-led international coalition is backing the offensive but President Donald Trump has said Washington plans to pull all of its troops out of Syria.

At Thursday's meeting with Putin, Erdogan said the planned US pull-out made it more important for other foreign powers to work together in Syria.

"The US withdrawal decision is one of the most important tests ahead of us. The uncertainty over how the decision will be implemented remains. It is very, very important that we work together in this new situation," he said.

As a sign of cooperation, he said Russia and Turkey had agreed to start "joint patrols" in order to contain "radical groups" in Idlib province, a north-western region of Syria still under rebel control.

He said there had been a "military agreement" on the joint patrols but provided no further details.

Erdogan also called for the removal of the Kurdish forces battling ISIS in north-eastern Syria.

"Syria's territorial integrity cannot be ensured and that region cannot be returned to its real owners before PYD-YPG is cleared from Manbij and the east of Euphrates," Erdogan said.

The Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) have held the strategic city of Manbij and areas east of the Euphrates since pushing out ISIS fighters.

Turkey considers the YPG, and its political branch the Democratic Union Party (PYD), as offshoots of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

In his meeting with Putin ahead of the talks, Rouhani called on Moscow to "coordinate more on efforts aimed at fighting terrorism" in Syria.

Before leaving for Sochi, Rouhani called the US withdrawal from Syria "good news".

"But we can never trust the Americans' words, promises and commitment," he said at Teheran's Mehrabad airport. "The Damascus government must be put in control of all of Syria's territories."

Both Russia and Iran have provided military backing to Assad's forces, while Turkey has supported rebel groups in the north who have fought with the Kurds.

The three countries have also launched the Astana peace process, which has eclipsed parallel talks led by the United Nations without coming up with a definitive solution to Syria's conflict.

Thursday's meeting is the fourth summit between the countries' leaders since November 2017.

It comes as the United States holds a two-day conference in Warsaw devoted to security in the Middle East, with a strong emphasis on Iran.

The conference includes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and several Arab powers but has drawn little interest from European powers.</s>Russian President Vladimir Putin is hosting the leaders of Turkey and Iran for talks about a Syria peace settlement as expectations mount for an imminent and final defeat of the Islamic State group.

The talks are expected to kick off in the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Thursday.

Russia, a key backer of Syrian President Bashar Assad, is getting increasingly impatient about militants in Syria's Idlib province.

Russia and Turkey, which supports the Syrian opposition, had brokered a cease-fire for Idlib, the last remaining rebel stronghold that averted a major government offensive but that deal has been strained as al-Qaida-linked militants seized towns and villages in Idlib.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says Russia is going to raise its concerns at the talks about the presence of "terrorists" there.</s>Baku. 4 February. REPORT.AZ/ Russian presidential spokesman Dmitriy Peskov said the presidents of Russia, Turkey and Iran - Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hassan Rouhani - will meet in Sochi on February 14.

Report informs citing RIA Novosti that Putin's bilateral meetings with the Turkish and Iranian leaders will take place on the same day.

The expected meeting with Putin in Sochi was announced by Erdogan in his statement for local press.</s>Presidents of Turkey, Russia and Iran met in Sochi late Thursday, expressing hope for Syria's future in a press conference.

"Hope for peace in Syria is at its strongest for first time," President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said during the conference with his counterparts Vladimir Putin and Hassan Rouhani.</s>WASHINGTON — As Trump administration officials presided over the second day of an international conference in Warsaw dominated by calls to ratchet up pressure on Iran, one longtime U.S. ally and NATO member was noticeably absent — Turkey.

Snubbing the gathering in Poland, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday attended a rival conference in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, where he planned to meet his Russian and Iranian counterparts to work out a final settlement of the war in Syria.

The dueling summits illustrate President Donald Trump’s struggle to forge a united front against Iran, and reflect Turkey’s drift away from Washington as it finds common ground with Moscow and Tehran, experts and former officials said.

For decades, the U.S. could count on Turkey as a reliable partner that would line up with other allies against Iran and support Washington’s strategic goals. But the political landscape has changed, U.S. influence in the region is in doubt, and Ankara is staking out an independent course, said Colin Clarke, senior research fellow at the Soufan Center, a New York-based think tank.

“I think we’re seeing a realignment,” Clarke told NBC News. “The U.S. has gone from the position where we called the shots, to where we are making mere suggestions to Turkey. That’s a major sea change.”

Turkey’s relations with Washington have come under mounting strain since Erdogan was elected president in 2014, as the Turkish leader has pushed back on U.S. policies and carried out a crackdown on dissent. But the conflict in Syria has opened up the most dramatic divide between the two countries, with Ankara infuriated at Washington’s support for Kurdish forces in Syria, which it sees as a terrorist threat.

When national security adviser John Bolton flew to Ankara in January, Erdogan refused to meet him and expressed outrage at U.S. demands that Turkey refrain from launching strikes against Kurdish fighters in northeastern Syria.

Civilians wait at a makeshift checkpoint after fleeing ISIS from the Syrian city of Bagouz on Feb. 9, 2019.Chris McGrath / Getty Images

“We cannot swallow . . . the message that Bolton gave in Israel,” the Turkish president said, and added that Bolton “probably doesn’t know” the difference between ethnic Kurds and armed Kurdish groups.

With the U.S. planning to withdraw its small contingent of 2,000 troops in Syria within months, Turkey has recognized for some time it must reach an accommodation with Russia and Iran to safeguard its interests in Syria, experts said.

“The real power brokers in Syria are Iran and Russia,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a former senior official under the Obama administration and now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank.

The three countries meeting in Sochi have emerged as the dominant players in what appears to be the final phase of the Syrian civil war. Russia and Iran came to the aid of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and have succeeded in turning the tide of the conflict in Assad’s favor.

A Syrian Democratic Forces fighter stands guard on a rooftop after retaking the city of Raqqa from ISIS fighters on Oct. 20, 2017.Bulent Kilic / AFP/Getty Images file

Turkey cultivated Islamist rebel groups opposed to Assad that have been beaten back for the most part. But Russia and Iran need Turkey’s help in squelching the rebels in their last strongholds in the northern province of Idlib, and Ankara needs Russian and Iranian cooperation to ensure Kurdish forces are kept in check and to pave the way for Syrian refugees to return, former U.S. diplomats said.

“I am confident that our trilateral summit on Syria will provide a new impulse toward stabilization in this country,” Putin said before the talks began in Sochi.

In discussions with Ankara, U.S. officials have revived the idea of a protected “buffer zone” for the Kurds in the northeast, but Erdogan has said any such area would have to be coordinated with Russia.

When an uprising erupted in Syria in 2011, Erdogan had hoped to see Assad fall. But Turkey has since come to accept that Assad is firmly in place, and that the Syrian regime’s patrons — Russia and Iran — will be needed to prevent a Kurdish state forming on Turkey’s southern border, said Aykan Erdemir, a member of the Turkish parliament from 2011-2015.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks to the media at the parliament in Ankara on Jan. 8, 2019.Burhan Ozbilici / AP

“Turkey realizes it has lost in Syria. And the Kurdish issue has always been the top priority for Turkey,” said Erdemir, now a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish think tank. And that “means you have to work with Russia,” he said.

As U.N. peace talks on Syria foundered in recent years despite backing from the United States, Turkey joined up with Russia and Iran for an alternative peace process that soon overshadowed the U.N. effort, a result that made the United States look impotent, foreign diplomats and experts said.

At a moment when Turkey’s fragile economy is plagued by debt and inflation, Ankara is anxious to retain close economic cooperation with Moscow, as it relies on gas supplies from Russia and revenues from Russian tourists and from Turkish contractors in Russia, Erdemir said. After a Russian fighter jet was downed by Turkey in November 2015, Moscow banned charter vacation trips to the country, dealing a severe blow to Turkey’s tourism industry.

Erdogan also sees Russia as an important alternative source for weapons. Ankara has ignored warnings from two successive U.S. administrations against buying the Russian-made S-400 missile system and Turkish officials say the plan to wrap up the purchase later this year.

Musa, a 25-year-old Kurdish marksman, stands atop a building as he looks at the destroyed Syrian town of Kobane, also known as Ain al-Arab, on Jan. 30, 2015. Kurdish forces recaptured the town on the Turkish frontier in a symbolic blow to the jihadists who have seized large swathes of territory in their onslaught across Syria and Iraq.Bulent Kilic / AFP – Getty Images file

Turkey is not alone in seeking to cultivate Russia, as other U.S. partners in the Middle East — including Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates — see Moscow as stepping into a vacuum left by the U.S., offering arms and energy deals.

“Everybody in the region is looking at Russia,” Goldenberg said. “With their relatively small intervention in Syria, they were basically were able to turn the tide in a regional war.”

Like Russia, Turkey has opposed the Trump administration’s hardline on Iran, and Erdogan has threatened to defy the U.S. sanctions reimposed on Tehran, calling them an “imperial” policy. During the last round of sanctions that preceded the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, Turkey was accused of turning a blind eye to sanctions busting.

The Trump administration last year granted Turkey an exemption to allow it to purchase oil from Iran, though at lower levels. But it remains clear if the White House is ready to renew the waiver to Ankara later this year.

Erdogan’s harsh treatment of political opponents, journalists and other critics, along with his preference for an Islamist political model at the expense of the country’s secular traditions, has put him at odds with the United States and the European Union. But he has dismissed Western objections, and his supporters point out that the democracies of Europe refused to open the door to Turkey’s request for EU membership for years.

Turkey has also bristled at America’s close embrace of Riyadh, opposing Saudi Arabia’s embargo on Qatar while competing with the kingdom to serve as the region’s leading Sunni power.

When the Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi was killed in Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul in October, Erdogan’s government leaked out damning details of the incident, forcing Riyadh to revise its official explanation more than once. “Turkey saw an opportunity to embarrass the Saudis, to gain leverage,” Goldenberg said.

So far, Turkey has yet to pay a serious price for its disagreements with Washington and European powers. Congress has threatened to sanction Turkey if it goes ahead with acquiring the Russian-made S-400 missiles, and Trump threatened to imposed sanctions if Ankara crushed the Kurds in Syria. But Erdogan has calculated that the United States is not ready to hit its old ally hard with punitive measures, experts said.

“I think he believes he has impunity in relations with the EU and the U.S., ” Erdemir said of the Turkish president. “Erdogan knows that Putin will push back, Iran will push back, not but the U.S.”</s>Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted the leaders of Turkey and Iran on Thursday, intensifying efforts to usher in peace in Syria as a fragile truce is threatened in the country’s final rebel stronghold.

The three presidents — Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Iran’s Hassan Rouhani — gathered at the Black Sea resort town of Sochi, where they pledged to take some sort of action against militants in Idlib province in northern Syria.

“I am confident that our trilateral summit on Syria will provide a new impulse toward stabilization in this country,” Putin said before sitting down with his counterparts. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Idlib is “definitely on the agenda.”

“The parties will definitely discuss the fact that terrorist groups continue to have a presence there,” he said.

Moscow, which entered the Syrian war militarily in 2015, has been cementing its role as the true arbiter of Syria’s future. Amid a pending U.S. withdrawal, key power-brokers in the region are looking to the Kremlin for guidance in charting a settlement.

Last fall, Russia and Turkey, which also has forces inside Syria, brokered a cease-fire in Idlib, sparing the area a devastating assault by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and preventing a humanitarian disaster.

But the persistence of Islamic State fighters, and the recent entry of groups linked to al-Qaeda, have now increased the possibility of an assault on the region, which is about the size of Lebanon.

Ahead of Thursday’s talks, a top Russian lawmaker said that bringing Idlib under Assad’s control was the only way to settle Syria’s future. “The state cannot be unified while a hotbed of anti-government activity persists,” Alexei Pushkov told the newspaper Izvestia.

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Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news</s>The presidents of Russia, Iran and Turkey on Thursday agreed that the upcoming withdrawal of United States troops from the Syrian conflict would be positive for the Arab nation.

Vladimir Putin, Hassan Rouhani and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met at the Russian Black Sea port of Sochi to discuss the military aspects of the long-lasting civil war with an eye toward future joint measures to be taken in order to help normalize the situation in Syria over the long term.
The Kremlin announces that Russia, Iran and Turkey will hold their fourth round of talks in Sochi on Thursday with regards to their roles in the Syrian Civil War.