Ahead of Putin-Obama meeting, Russia presses military efforts in Syria

As leaders gather in New York at the United Nations General Assembly, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry discussed Syria with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. He said that while it was vital to coordinate efforts against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), this was not yet happening.

“I think we have concerns about how we are going to go forward,” Kerry told reporters. U.S. officials said Kerry was working on a new political initiative in New York that would include Russia and key regional powers.

A senior State Department official told reporters: “It was a very thorough exchange of views on both the military and the political implications of Russia’s increased engagement in Syria.”

Kerry also discussed Syria with Iran's foreign minister during a meeting at the United Nations on Saturday.

Ahead of his early evening Monday meeting with Putin, Obama in his speech at the U.N. emphasized the need for a political resolution to Syria's civil war that includes the ouster of President Bashar Assad, a Russian ally.

"We must recognize that there cannot be, after so much bloodshed, so much carnage, a return to the pre-war status quo," he declared during his annual address to the United Nations General Assembly.

Putin was expected to make his case to the audience of world leaders gathered in New York in a subsequent speech.

Obama rejected Putin's continued support for Assad, saying that simply arguing that the "alternative is surely worse" is not a solution to a crisis that has killed more than 250,000 people since it began in 2011, led to a flood of refugees and created a vacuum for ISIL and other armed groups.

Iraq's military said Sunday it would begin sharing “security and intelligence” information with Syria, Russia and Iran to help combat ISIL. The move could further complicate U.S. efforts to battle the group without working with Damascus and its allies, and could potentially give Moscow more sway in the Middle East.

Putin, meanwhile, has derided U.S. efforts to end the Syria war, which has driven a tide of refugees into neighboring states and Europe.

He said Moscow, which this month sent tanks and warplanes to a Russian military base in Syria, was itself trying to create a “coordinated framework” to resolve the conflict.

“We would welcome a common platform for collective action against the terrorists,” Putin said in an interview on Sunday on CBS's “60 Minutes.”

Moscow's recent military engagement in Syria is expected to be a key topic of conversation for Putin and Obama, who will be meeting face to face for the first time in nearly a year.

But underscoring their deep differences, the U.S. and Russia couldn't even agree on the purpose of the meeting, which will occur on the sidelines of an annual United Nations summit. The White House said it would focus on Ukraine, where the two countries remain at loggerheads over Russian support for pro-Russian Ukrainian rebels in Ukraine’s east, and getting Moscow to live up to a fragile peace plan in the country. But the Kremlin said Ukraine would be discussed only if time allowed, with Syria and the fight against ISIL dominating the discussions.

Despite little sign of a breakthrough on either front, U.S. officials insisted it was still worthwhile for the leaders to meet — something that has happened rarely since Obama vowed to isolate Putin in retaliation for Russia's actions in Ukraine.

“The president believed it would be irresponsible to let this occasion in which the two leaders would be in the same city pass without trying to test to see whether progress could be made on these newly intractable crises,” Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said Sunday on ABC's “This Week.”

Ahead of his U.N. visit, Putin deployed more weapons and troops to Syria. The Kremlin has also intensified its diplomatic efforts in recent months, launching a dialogue with Saudi Arabia, which is firmly bent on unseating Assad, and the Syrian opposition, in a renewed attempt to try to negotiate a political compromise.

Russia has shown no indication that it would dump its support for Assad, whom it has shielded from U.N. sanctions and continued to provide with weapons throughout the nation's more than four-year civil war.

Putin's calls for strengthening Assad's military come amid striking troubles for Obama's plan to train and arm moderate rebels to fight ISIL in Syria. A $500 million Pentagon training program has resulted in just a handful of fighters to bolster airstrikes from a U.S.-led coalition, a fact that Putin pointed out in his Sunday CBS interview.

The U.S. has agreed to talk with Russia about “de-conflicting” their military action in Syria. U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has spoken to his Russian counterpart about Syria earlier this month, the first military-to-military conversation in more than a year.

But it will be hard for Moscow and Washington to reach any common ground on Syria beyond the military talks. Putin clearly has no intention of joining the U.S.-led coalition in Syria, which would mean accepting U.S. orders, and Washington has voiced concern that Russia is using its military presence in Syria to shore up Assad, whom it sees as the cause of the Syrian crisis.

Obama and Putin have long had a strained relationship and their body language in face-to-face meetings is always closely scrutinized for signs of tension. Their last formal meeting was in June 2013, though they've had a number of conversations on the sidelines of international summits, including in China last November.

Al Jazeera and wire services