On Jan. 18, Qatar Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani  paid his first official visit to Russia, to meet with President Vladimir Putin. Since the Syrian war began, Russia and Qatar have been in opposing camps. Each perceives the other as a major spoiler in the conflict. Harsh rhetoric, often stylistically similar, sometimes flies both ways.

Before the new round of Geneva talks on Syria, now rescheduled for Jan. 29, Moscow continues to reconnoiter the ground of key regional and international players. In that regard, the talks with the emir were part of what came to be known in the Russian media as “the Middle East autumn.” Since September, Putin has hosted the presidents of Iran, Syria and Egypt; the prime ministers of Iraq and Israel; the Kuwaiti emir; the Saudi defense minister; the crown prince of Abu Dhabi; and — twice — the king of Jordan. At other venues, he has held negotiations with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and then Saudi King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud. This “Middle Eastern diplomacy marathon” — another euphemism savored by Russian journalists — was perceived as an indication of Russia’s serious interest in the region and its commitment to work with all regional stakeholders in the Syria crisis. Qatar was left out of this picture because of positions that Moscow and Doha found irreconcilable. In December, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov singled out disagreements with Qatar as “one of the major problems in the Syrian settlement process.”

Over the last quarter century, Russian-Qatari relations have been sluggish for the most part. Moscow deemed Qatar and Saudi Arabia to be fueling insurgency in the first Chechen war (1994-1996) and terrorist movements in the second one. The relationship went from bad to worse in 2004 after Russian security forces assassinated in Doha a prominent ideologist of Chechen separatists and in 2011 when Qatari airport security accosted Russia’s ambassador to Qatar when he refused to allow the diplomatic mail he carried from Moscow to be checked. The Arab Spring and the civil war in Syria drove the parties farther apart.

Therefore, the Jan. 18 meeting between the current leaders of Russia and Qatar was a much-anticipated event. The minor agenda of the talks was rather successful and resulted in bilateral agreements on two topics: visa-free travel for diplomatic passport holders and cultural cooperation. In turn, business experts were left with a task of creating a framework to boost economic cooperation that had failed miserably in recent years: In 2015, the trade between the two states was half the $55 million it amounted to a year earlier.