Erdogan meets 'dear friend' Putin as Russia, Turkey consider cooperation on Syria

ANKARA Less than a week before his scheduled trip to the NATO summit in Washington, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, met in Astana on Wednesday and reaffirmed their commitment to bilateral relations as well as increasing cooperation in Syria.

The two leaders discussed bilateral and regional issues during their hour-long meeting on the sidelines of a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in the Kazakh capital, according to Russian and Turkish statements.

“We have not been able to meet my dear friend for a long time,” Erdogan told Putin during the on-camera portion of their meeting, reiterating the two countries' goal of increasing bilateral trade volume to $100 billion from the current $55 billion.

Erdogan, along with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, is the only NATO leader to have close contacts with Putin since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The last meeting between the two leaders was in September 2023.

But the meeting comes as trade volumes between the two countries have been falling, with the United States increasing pressure on Ankara to crack down on Russian companies that use Turkey to circumvent Western sanctions over the war in Ukraine. Bilateral trade between Turkey and Russia has fallen by more than $2 billion since January, according to official data.

“We have noted a slight decline in trade turnover in recent months, but it remains at a fairly high level,” Putin told Erdogan during their meeting.

At a press conference on the eve of the meeting, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that relations between the two countries were facing inevitable problems. He added that there was political will to resolve them, according to the Russian news agency Interfax.

Turkey, which supplies 49% of its energy needs to Russia, has not adhered to Western sanctions against Russia due to the war in Ukraine. Trade between the two countries nearly doubled in 2022, reaching more than $62 billion.

Engagement with Damascus

The two leaders also discussed the Syrian conflict in which Ankara and Moscow support rival camps.

Erdogan told Putin that Turkey was ready to cooperate in efforts to find a solution to the war, according to the Turkish account of the meeting.

“He stressed the importance of taking concrete steps to end the instabilities that create fertile ground for terrorist organizations, especially in the Syrian civil war… Turkey is ready to cooperate to find a solution,” the Turkish statement said.

Erdogan and Putin met amid growing regional efforts to resume direct dialogue between senior Turkish and Syrian officials. Both Erdogan and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have expressed openness to resuming talks in the past two weeks. The Russian-brokered dialogue launched in 2022 has stalled, with Damascus setting a precondition for Turkish forces to withdraw from Syrian territory before normalization. Ankara, for its part, fears that the power vacuum resulting from such a move could be filled by the US-allied Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which Turkey views as a threat to its national security.

Reiterating his country's position, Erdogan stressed Turkey's determination not to allow a terrorist organization just beyond its borders, the statement said, referring to Ankara's concerns about SDF-controlled regions gaining formal autonomy.

Turkey equates the Kurdish-led SDF with the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party, which has waged an armed campaign for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey since 1984. The SDF is a major ally of the U.S.-led international coalition against Islamic State in parts of northern and eastern Syria.

While Turkey supports Syrian opposition armed groups fighting Assad, Russia, along with Iran, are the main international backers of the Assad regime in the civil war.