Conflicting statements from Turkey’s president about the country’s ill-fated Syria policy have apparently disrupted secret talks between Syrian opposition rebels and Russia that are being brokered by his own government. The Financial Times reported today that negotiations over an Aleppo cease-fire were derailed after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey’s sole purpose in sending its troops to Syria were to overthrow the country’s President Bashar al-Assad.

The talks apparently resumed only after Erdogan and Putin spoke on the phone on Nov. 30. On the same day, Erdogan publicly declared that the target of the Turkish-led Operation Euphrates Shield in northern Syria was "not a particular country or individual" but "solely terrorist organizations."

The controversy unfolded just as Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov traveled to the resort city of Alanya on Nov. 30 to talk about Syria and other bilateral matters with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu. At a news conference following their talks today, Cavusoglu said that he and Lavrov had agreed on a cease-fire in Aleppo but that Turkey’s stance on Assad remained unchanged.

In an interesting aside, US president-elect Donald Trump's oldest son, Donald Jr., was in the neighboring resort of Antalya around the same time as Lavrov. His secret visit, first reported by the independent Turkish online news portal Diken, was purportedly to hunt wild goats in the area at the invitation of an unidentified Turkish businessman.