Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Aug. 5 meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin appears to have turned a page in Ankara’s chilly ties with Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Russia’s Muslim-majority Chechen Republic and a Putin loyalist. Turkey’s foreign minister and intelligence chief, who accompanied Erdogan in Sochi, huddled with Kadyrov on the sidelines of the summit, and it was the Chechen leader who made the meeting public on Telegram.

Kadyrov has long been associated with espionage claims and a series of murders of Chechen dissidents in Turkey. That senior Turkish officials were willing to meet him not long after he publicly berated Erdogan portends a political shift on Ankara’s part — a diplomatic feat that could be chalked up not to Kadyrov, but rather his boss. Putin had so far refrained from taking the Chechen leader to his meetings with Erdogan, even though he would often have him in his entourage when meeting with other Muslim leaders.

Kadyrov has proven his loyalty to Putin by contributing special forces to Russia’s military operations in Syria and Ukraine. His soldiers were deployed as military police in Syria, primarily in Aleppo, showing the locals a “Muslim face” of the Russian mission. Their deployment was meant to mend the terrible image left by fighters from Russia’s Caucasian regions who joined the Islamic State or allied with the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front in Syria’s civil war. Kadyrov also took on the restoration of the nine-century-old Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo and another historical mosque in Homs. Yet, the fighters he sent to the war in Ukraine have created an opposite image to that of helping reconstruction in Syria. In both Ukraine and Syria, Kadyrov’s missions have clashed with Erdogan’s policies. 

Details about the meeting in Sochi are limited to what Kadyrov shared on Telegram the following day. “We had a rich and productive informal discussion, at which we agreed on the need to establish close cooperation between Turkey and the Chechen Republic on various issues,” he wrote. Turkish Foreign Minister “Mevlut Cavusoglu expressed hope that this informal meeting would be the beginning of further development of relations and establishing contacts. I agreed with him and noted that both sides will benefit from joint initiatives.” He added he was extended an invitation to visit Turkey and readily accepted.