NATO | Turkish President Erdoğan will meet Putin in Tehran, Iran on Tuesday

Russian president Vladimir Putin and Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will meet face-to-face on Tuesday in Tehran, Iran, a Kremlin statement said last week. The Iranian president will also participate in the meeting Ebrahim Raisi.

The meeting is only Putin’s second trip abroad since the country started its attack on Ukraine, according to the French media Le Monde. Putin visited Tajikistan in June.

According to the Kremlin, the meeting will discuss the situation in Syria. Turkey, Russia and Iran have long participated in the Syrian civil war, where Russia and Iran have supported the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad regime, and Turkey in turn has supported some groups fighting against the regime and sought to suppress Kurdish groups in northern Syria.

The meeting of the president of NATO country Turkey with NATO’s main adversary Russia and the arch-enemy of the United States in the Middle East, Iran, arouses suspicion, especially in Washington, estimates the professor of international politics and the head of the research college of the University of Helsinki Tuomas Forsberg for STT.

“Yes, without a doubt, it will tighten the gap, depending of course on what comes out of the meeting. Even the meeting itself is suspect to many, and this applies to Iran as well as Russia. The nature of the meeting may throw more water into the stale discussion about Turkey’s position in NATO. If Turkey trades in cows with the country named as the most significant threat to the alliance, so it’s a big deal for the entire alliance,” says Forsberg.

The talks in Tehran are officially part of the so-called Astana peace process, a project led by Russia, Iran and Turkey to end Syria’s more than decade-long civil war. According to the Kremlin, Putin will also discuss bilaterally with Erdoğan in the same context. According to AFP news agency Kremlin sources, Putin and Erdoğan are discussing the export of grain from Ukraine.

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in Finland the general subject of suspicion and speculation has been that Turkey and Russia would have agreed behind the scenes on some kind of cow trade, where Russia looks down on Turkey’s activities in Syria in exchange for the delay caused by Turkey in Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO membership process. Turkey has not yet ratified the membership of Finland and Sweden.

Forsberg does not believe that Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO project will be the subject of the discussions in Tehran.

“You could imagine that they have much more important things to talk about than this issue of Finland. There has been no evidence that this (the delay in the membership of Finland and Sweden) was a matter of complicity between Russia and Turkey. It is not excluded, but there are more important topics on the agenda” , Forsberg says.

Although Ukraine now takes the majority of Russia’s attention and resources, the country has not given up on its goals in Syria.

“Russia is still trying to keep Assad in power and thereby gain regional bargaining power. By being in Syria, Russia has more say in relation to Israel, for example, than if it were not there,” says Forsberg.