The same week that US President Donald Trump announced his intention to “get out” of Syria and withdraw the remaining 2,000 American troops there “very soon,” the leaders of Russia, Turkey and Iran were once again meeting to chart Syria’s future.

On April 4, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in Ankara for a trilateral summit on Syria, their second in six months.

Maxim Suchkov writes, “The leaders have come to believe the real shots regarding Syria are being called in the meetings among themselves. And while Geneva is stalled, if not comatose, conditions on the ground are fast-changing. These three stakeholders in the Syria conflict feel they’d be better positioned to drive change themselves rather than waiting until it starts.”

The Astana framework, established by Moscow, Ankara and Tehran in January 2017, has now eclipsed the UN-backed Geneva process, despite the perfunctory reference to Geneva in the Ankara summit statement. The statement supported both the integration of a constitutional committee, resulting from the Syrian National Dialogue Congress held Jan. 30 in Sochi, Russia, into the Geneva framework, and the Astana working group established March 15 to deal with the “release of detainees/abductees and handover of the bodies as well as the identification of missing persons.”