Last week, as President Obama entertained the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner and Britain indulged in a bizarre debate about whether Hitler was a Zionist, more than 200 people were killed in a brutal bombardment of Aleppo. The breakdown of Syria’s fragile ceasefire promises yet more suffering in a five-year long war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and created millions of refugees.

Yet, amid all the misery, there is hope. It is possible that this year could witness two huge and positive developments. The first would be the military defeat of the jihadis of Isis, who could lose their two major strongholds in Syria — the towns of Raqqa and Deir al-Zour. The second crucial development would be the achievement of a peace deal between the Syrian regime and the non-jihadi rebels.

The key to both developments is close co-operation between Washington and Moscow. Despite the obvious tensions between Russia and the United States, their views of the Syrian conflict have been converging, laying the basis for a joint approach to defeating Isis and ending the war.