President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani met on April 4 in Ankara for their second three-way summit that discussed reaching a ceasefire across Syria and supporting a political resolution of the crisis in the war-torn country.
Russia, Turkey and Iran are all involved in the Syria crisis and have sponsored a series of peace talks in the Kazakh capital, Astana. The three leaders held the first tripartite summit in Sochi last November as the guarantor countries of the Astana process, for which they have worked together to create “de-escalation zones” to reduce the fighting in Syria and bring the sides of the conflict together to negotiate Syria’s future. In a final communique the leaders stressed on maintaining the unity of Syria and continuing their fight on extremist groups.
Putin arrived a day earlier in Turkey, 3 April, to launch the construction of Turkey's first nuclear power station which and promised to quicken the delivery of air defence systems to Ankara which is alarming NATO, the western security bloc that Turkey has always belonged to.
