No foreign leader can talk to Vladimir Putin these days without discussing Syria. And the Russian president has met many this month, as he hopped from Paris to Berlin to a Russia-European Union summit in St Petersburg and on to China. European leaders in particular pressed him to take a firmer line against Syria's president, Bashar Assad. But Mr Putin stuck firmly to his position: both sides are to blame, and any push from the West to unseat Mr Assad risks igniting civil war.
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