this is the ideal first step - the russians and turks need to talk this out without the americans wasting their time and interrupting them.

for all of the propaganda about putin & erdogan, the reality is that they are both rational actors and should be able to work out a compromise that does the following things:

1. recreates the internationally recognized syrian borders, which is what the russians want - a return to normalcy.
2. find some way to do something with what are, in fact, kurdish militant groups camped on the turkish border and that will certainly eventually threaten the turks if left to incubate. these groups are going to need to be given safe passage somewhere: to iraq, to iran or to...russia.

i'll throw a wild card out there: the jews never warmed to the idea of a homeland in russia, but they've long been convinced they're semitic and belong in the middle east (whether it's really true or not). the kurds are a caucasian-iranian group that has lived in the zagros mountains as refugees for centuries, with meaningful ethno-linguistic roots in largely uninhabited areas of russia. at some point in the distant past, the kurds migrated in from the steppes, and then, centuries later, found themselves in perpetual isolation when the iranians were expelled from mesopotamia by the arabs, eventually adopting their religion but never being fully accepted into the new culture. this area is historically not iranian, but where armenians and semites, and then great empires, fought wars against each other; it follows that the best that the kurds can really hope for is to be a part of an iranian province, as an independent kurdistan could never be more than a minor iran - a "west iran", if you will, but the arabs in iraq aren't inviting the ayatollah in, either, nor are the turks looking for partition. i don't think i've ever heard anybody say it, but it's not a crazy idea; an autonomous oblast in the urals is more sovereignty than they're ever likely to get in an area of the world that they're really not indigenous to.

so, as an independent kurdistan isn't a sustainable idea in the long run (it would just be a temporarily existent "west iran" - even if it lasted 100 years), there's really two serious outcomes here: a reconstruction of greater iran (including northern iraq and eastern turkey) or for the kurds to accept minority status within the countries of the region. neither option is anything close to kurdish sovereignty, which is really geopolitically impossible in this exact location.

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkey-to-dispatch-high-level-team-to-russia-for-syria-talks-140046