Vladimir Putin has taken personal charge of efforts to turn a Syrian ceasefire into reality this weekend, holding a frantic round of phone calls with world leaders and instructing the Russian military to reduce the number of airstrikes over the past two days.



The Russian president spoke by phone to leaders in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Syria in an attempt to garner support for the ceasefire, and explain its complex details.

He has also opened a coordination centre to which the warring parties can send complaints of specific breaches of the truce. Some armed groups in Syria have already signed up to the truce, according to Russia. Jihadi groups Islamic State and al-Nusra Front are excluded under the terms of the ceasefire, agreed between Washington and Moscow on Monday. It is not clear whether all Syrian opposition groups – some with indirect links to al-Nusra Front – will sign up to those terms, threatening the ceasefire’s credibility.

The opposition parties, gathered under the Saudi-sponsored negotiating committee, have not given a definitive endorsement of the truce. The opposition fears Syrian government forces, backed by the Russian air force, will continue to attack rebels under the pretext of targeting al-Nusra.

There is also scepticism in London about the Russian initiative being genuine, and not an effort to buy time and strengthen the Syrian army.

The UK has long been doubtful that Russia’s foreign secretary, Sergei Lavrov, is the decisionmaker on Moscow’s Syrian policy, arguing that Putin calls the shots with a small coterie of national security advisers. That Putin is injecting political capital into the ceasefire process may therefore be encouraging.

In a space of three hours on Wednesday, he spoke on the phone to the Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, and Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.

It is possible Putin’s close involvement is a sign that he recognises the civil war, now entering its fifth year, will not end through military means, and that he gauges the geographical gains made by the Syrian government forces – particularly around Aleppo in the past three months – have sufficiently strengthened Assad’s hand at the negotiating table.

So far Russian casualties have been relatively light. It was claimed but not confirmed or reported in Moscow that a group of generals were killed in an attack on a Russian airbase in eastern Syrian by rebel group Ahrar al-Sham, which has links to al-Qaida but opposes Isis.



A ceasefire before the start of political talks would allow forces to be trained on Isis in northern and western Syria, Barack Obama said after agreeing to the truce initiative with Putin in a phone call on Monday.

But Obama sounded a cautious note on Wednesday about steps the US and Russia are taking to put in place the ceasefire, despite also citing progress in pushing the Islamic State group out of territory in Iraq and Syria.

Obama’s comments came after meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II at the White House, where the two leaders said that pursuing the political process designed to end the civil war and take the fight to Isis are their top priorities in Syria.

“We are very cautious about raising expectations on this,” Obama said. “The situation on the ground is difficult.”

Meanwhile, in a positive step the UN security council was told that the first UN air drop of 21 tonnes of aid to the besieged city of Deir ez-Zor has been successfully completed. The UN had always said it would use food drops as a last resort.

The UN aid chief, Stephen O’Brien, said some 110,000 people living in besieged towns had received aid and that deliveries, including air drops, to a further 230,000 people in cutoff areas in Syria had been approved. But he also stressed the Syrian government was still blocking 40 inter-agency requests to deliver aid to hard to reach and besieged areas.

“Granting access should never be dependent on political negotiations or ad hoc deals on the ground,” O’Brien said. He added: “It is hard to believe that this conflict can be resolved as long as there continues to be a complete absence of protection for civilians.”