Necessary and sufficient conditions are provided for phase synchronization of systems of identical nonlinear oscillators. The oscillators considered are described by the set of equations

. The type of coupling considered is

where

and

. Our approach is not based on the asymptotic methods of Mitropolsky and Bogoliubov and the coupling can be arbitrarily large. The conditions can be used successfully in several cases and some of the results can be extended to systems of slightly different oscillators.