Erdoğan and Putin hold face-to-face talks over Syria ceasefire

Turkey's president wants to shore up the truce because it has been ruptured repeatedly in the last 18 months

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoan and Russian president Vladimir Putin have held face-to-face talks for the first time since the pandemic in which they discussed the future of the last pocket of Syria outside regime control.

The leaders met in Russia's Black Sea resort town of Sochi for Wednesday's summit, Erdoan sought to shore up a March 2020 ceasefire deal which ended a bruising assault by Bashar al-Assad and his Russian allies on Turkish-backed fighters in north-west Syria. The fighting last year brought Ankara and Moscow close to direct confrontation and threatened Turkey - which is already home to around four million Syrians - with a new wave of refugees.