The meeting of the Russian and Turkish presidents, which took place this week (Putin and Erdogan assign primary importance to Syria) was positively assessed by experts.
Thus, head of the Oriental Languages department at the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Foreign Ministry Aslambek Mozloev noted that the last summit saw for the first time that Russia and Turkey had moved from an exclusively economic factor of joining efforts to an economic and political factor. "It is about combining political and economic efforts to ensure mutual understanding between the two countries. If you asked me what was the main refrain of the results of President Erdogan's visit to Moscow, I would give you one word - constructiveness. Both sides were aimed at achieving constructiveness, not at emphasizing contradictions between the parties, but at striving to solve a problem constructively on a positive basis, the regional problem which cannot be solved for more than eight years."
In February, Sochi is set to host the next Russia-Turkey-Iran summit. According to Aslambek Mozloev, Russia, Turkey and Iran are able to form a new institute for solving regional problems, facing the world in conditions of aggravating all-against-all contradictions. The preservation of the Russia-Turkey-Iran alliance on the Syrian issue and the activation of this institution have great prospects."
A research fellow of the Institute for Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Director of the Center for Modern Turkish Studies Amur Hajiyev noted that the displacement of the Kurdish people's self-defense detachments from Manbij to the east of the Euphrates is of primary importance to Turkey. "After solving this problem, the Turks intend to make efforts in order to provide an opportunity for the people living there to return to their homes. Although this is fixed out in the U.S.-Turkish Manbij roadmap, the unwillingness of the U.S. to act in this direction according to the Turkish schedule is evident."
According to Hajiyev, in the period of exacerbation of the Turkish-American contradictions in Syria, "geographical maps depicting the so-called Greater Kurdistan, which, according to the authors, should include the Kurdish territories of Syria, Iraq and Turkey, are seen in the Turkish media from time to time. In addition, the Turks periodically write that they do not believe that the Americans will abandon the idea of creating Kurdistan and constantly expects some new tricks from them. That is, the U.S. strategy toward the Middle East is associated with new threats in Turkey now. According to most Turkish observers, Kurdistan will allow both the U.S. and Israel to limit Iran’s actions in the region, as well as influence decision-making in Ankara, Damascus and Baghdad."
Hajiyev is convinced that the Turkish approach to regional policy is changing: "If before the Turks acted in the region after consulting with the United States and formed their own line of conduct with other external players in the region on the basis of agreements reached with Washington, now we see a different picture: when developing its Syrian and to some extent Middle Eastern policy, Turkey not only takes into account Russia's interests, but also prefers to act in the region and even started to build up its interaction with Washington after an appropriate consultation with Moscow. This is a fundamentally new trend in modern Turkey's foreign policy."
