Putin in Ankara Ahead of Meeting on Syria

MESOPOTAMIA NEWS TOP OF THE AGENDA / IMPORTANT MEETING !

3 April 2018 – Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday in Ankara, where they will follow the ground-breaking ceremony for Turkey’s first nuclear power plant (RFE/RL), built with Russian support, over video conference, the Kremlin said. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani will join the pair on Wednesday to discuss trilateral efforts to negotiate an end to the Syrian conflict (Hurriyet).

MESOP NEWS ANALYSIS

“The prospect of Russia, Turkey and Iran agreeing what a new status quo inside Syria should look like is a short-term stopgap at best, and one that overlooks the underlying and unresolved causes of the war,” Nick Paton Walsh writes for CNN.

“Instead of trumpeting each new ceasefire as a first step toward peace – when their basic terms are the same as those of previous failed ceasefires—bogus ceasefires need to be seen as integral to Assad’s military strategy,” Mohammed Alaa Ghanem writes for Chatham House.

“Turkey’s military campaign on [the Syrian city of] Afrin and the expansion of its own influence on the ground in Syria also means that the Syrian regime will find it difficult to extend its military control in the north west because that would put it in direct confrontation with Turkey. This further challenges the notion that the Syrian regime is ‘winning’ the war in Syria,” Lina Khatib writes for Asharq Al-Awsat.

https://www.rferl.org/a/putin-erdogan-ankara-meeting-russia-turkey-syria-iran/29141588.html

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