REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, ENNISKILLEN - Western leaders rebuked Russian President Vladimir Putin for supporting Syria's Bashar al-Assad's attempt to crush a two-year-old uprising, setting the stage for a tense G8 summit of the world's most powerful nations.

US President Barack Obama is expected to use his first face-to-face meeting with Putin in a year to try to persuade the Kremlin chief to bring Assad to the negotiating table to end a conflict in which at least 93,000 people have been killed.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, who is chairing the G8 summit in a remote golf resort in Northern Ireland, conceded there was "a big difference" between the positions of Russia and the West on how to resolve the war.

In some of his most colorful remarks on Syria, Putin described anti-Assad groups as cannibals who ate human flesh and warned Obama of the dangers of giving guns to such people. Moscow also said it would not permit no-fly zones over to Syria.

For their part, Western leaders have criticized Russia, Syria's most powerful ally, for sending weapons to Assad forces and considering deliveries of a sophisticated missile system.

"How can we allow that Russia continues to deliver arms to the Bashar al-Assad regime when the opposition receives very few and is being massacred?" French President Francois Hollande said.

Divisions over Syria dominated the atmosphere as global leaders streamed into the heavily guarded resort in Northern Ireland, a place once rocked by decades of violence but which Cameron now wants to showcase as a model of conflict resolution.

Moscow and Washington both agree that the bloodshed in Syria should stop and say they are genuinely trying to overcome mistrust between them. They had earlier agreed to set up a Syrian peace conference in Geneva but progress has been slow.

The European Union has dropped its arms embargo on Syria, allowing France and Britain to arm the rebels, though Cameron expressed concern about some of Assad's foes.

"Let's be clear - I am as worried as anybody else about elements of the Syrian opposition, who are extremists, who support terrorism and who are a great danger to our world," Cameron said.

Syria aside, Cameron wants to focus on the formal agenda on tax, trade and transparency, dubbed "The Three Ts", topics expected to dominate discussions on Tuesday.

As the summit kicked off on Monday afternoon, the United States and the EU opened negotiations for the world's most ambitious free-trade deal, promising thousands of new jobs and accelerated growth on both sides of the Atlantic.

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