Syrian stare-down: Obama’s icy toast with Putin embodies clash over fate of Syrian leader Assad

US President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin have sharply disagreed at the United Nations over the chaos in Syria, with Obama urging a political transition to replace the Syrian president but Putin warning it would be a mistake to abandon the current government.

After dueling speeches at the United Nations General Assembly, Obama and Putin also met privately for 90 minutes — their first face-to-face encounter in nearly a year. The pair also shared a champagne toast, Obama stony-faced, at a luncheon hosted by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

At the heart of their dispute over Syria is the fate of embattled Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, a Russian ally. The US has long called for Assad to leave power, while Russia has cast the Syrian government as the only viable option for confronting the Islamic State, a militant group that has taken advantage of the vacuum created by the civil war.

Putin, speaking to the UN General Assembly shortly after the US president, urged the world to stick with Assad.

“We believe it’s a huge mistake to refuse to co-operate with the Syrian authorities, with the government forces, those who are bravely fighting terror face-to-face,” Putin said during his first appearance at the UN gathering in a decade.

During his earlier address to the UN, Obama declared: “We must recognise that there cannot be, after so much bloodshed, so much carnage, a return to the prewar status quo.”

Obama and Putin’s disparate views of the grim situation in Syria left little indication of how the two countries might work together to end a conflict that has killed more than 250,000 people and resulted in a flood of refugees. Indeed, the leaders’ private meetings ended with vague statements about the need for a political resolution to the crisis, but no clear pathway for making that happen.