HELSINKI, March 3. /TASS/. Moscow hopes Russian President Vladimir Putin’s meeting with his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will help improve the situation with the implementation of agreements on Syria’s Idlib, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday.

"Regrettably, [the Russian-Turkish agreements on Idlib] are not being implemented. I hope the meeting between Presidents Putin and Erdogan later this week will make it possible to change this situation and begin to move along the path of the implementation of what has been agreed," he told a news conference.

Putin and Erdogan are expected to meet in Moscow on March 5.

The situation around Syria’s Idlib aggravated on February 27 when, according to the Russian defense ministry, militants attempted a large-scale attack. The Syrian government army retaliated by delivering a strike, which, Ankara claims, killed 33 Turkish soldiers. The Russian defense ministry stated however that the Turkish soldiers who had come under fire from the Syrian army were fighting along with the terrorists.