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Alexander Baunov is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and a visiting fellow at the European University Institute.
In 2015, when Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Syria at the request of dictator Bashar al-Assad, he had several goals in mind. He wanted to help Russia escape the international isolation it endured following its annexation of Crimea in 2014. He sought to return Russia to a position of influence in the Middle East, where its presence had waned after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And he wanted to establish Russia as a global power capable of supporting its allies and halting efforts to topple friendly governments. The intervention in Syria also allowed Russia to assume the role of protector of Christians in the Middle East—a role that, in Putin’s view, decadent Western powers had abdicated, and a mission that fit neatly with Putin’s desire to present Russia as Europe’s last bastion of Christian values.
Following the immediate collapse of the Assad regime, Putin has little to show for this triple agenda. Russia faces the loss of its military bases in the Middle East and has shown little fear for the Syrian Christians it claimed to protect, as Assad’s secular government was overthrown through the Islamist organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. And Russia’s isolation from the foreign network has only intensified since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
At the heart of the Russian intervention is a message to smaller countries that are not strongly aligned with Western powers: align with us and we will protect you from Western-backed regime changes. For nearly a decade, this message seemed credible. But today things look different. Putin’s steadfast determination to achieve an overall victory over Ukraine relegated Russia’s other foreign policy goals to the background and credited him with one of his greatest foreign policy successes. The fall of Assad invalidates Russia’s claim to be a guarantor of the stability of the regime of allied governments. As long as the war in Ukraine continues, Ukraine will continue to be unable to export its security abroad.
From the beginning, Russia’s involvement in Syria was related to Ukraine. Moscow saw the Arab Spring of the 2010s as an extension of the Maidan protests in Kiev and the “color revolutions” that rocked post-Soviet countries a decade earlier, which Putin saw as imaginable rehearsals for an imaginable attempt to overthrow his own regime. Of course, on the surface Putin presented the Russian intervention in Syria as an anti-terrorist operation. Although the West rejected Russia’s initial partnership with the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) in Syria, it accepted the truth of Russia’s involvement in the war against a non-unusual – or at least overlapping – enemy. The United States, Turkey and several Gulf states established channels of military communication with Russia, which was no longer considered only a foreign pariah, as had been the case after the annexation of Crimea.
At the same time, to help the Assad regime, Russia has deepened its relations with Iran, creating a joint military commission, delivering S-300 missiles to Tehran despite American objections and trying to circumvent foreign sanctions. Putin has also not hesitated to engage in dialogue with Türkiye over its aid to Syrian insurgent forces, going so far as to impose industry sanctions against Ankara. However, his military intervention did not lead to a confrontation with the region’s Sunni states, as Putin’s critics had predicted. Although Russian-Turkish relations range between hostility and friendship (Putin helped Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a coup attempt in 2016), the Gulf states have Moscow’s proven show of military force in a difficult confrontation. which in the past had been difficult to manage. Assad was reintegrated into the Arab League, high-level contacts between Russia and the Gulf countries have become more frequent, industry between Russia and the United Arab Emirates has increased, and Saudi Arabia and Russia have begun to coordinate their oil policy.
This warm welcome has spread beyond the Middle East. Countries in Africa, Central Asia and, to a lesser extent, Latin America have found Moscow’s ability to protect an allied regime opposed to internal turmoil and overthrow reassuring. In the past, Russia has struggled to present itself as a compelling generation investor or exporter, outside of building nuclear plants and supplying weapons. But its successful defense of Assad allowed the Kremlin to promote itself as an exporter of security, either officially through the Russian armed forces, or unofficially, through mercenaries such as the paramilitary company Wagner, which fought on the ground alongside the Syrian army, Hezbollah and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as the Russian armed forces operated primarily in the air.
The pitch was effective: African governments, including regimes in Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Chad, Libya, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, and South Sudan and secular post-Soviet regimes in Central Asia such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan have made use of the offer of Russian troops and mercenaries in their struggles against armed guerrillas and Islamist and separatist groups, as well as for training local armed forces and protection services. For the Central Asian governments, Russia has long been seen as a protector against internal unrest caused by Islamists and Western-backed political opposition, and the Syrian intervention strengthened this perception.
By preventing the overthrow of Assad and returning to Assad’s control most of the territory Syria had lost to rebels, Russia demonstrated that it could influence and even reverse the course of events in the region. At the same time, Gulf countries were offered investment projects in Russia and given diplomatic support from the Kremlin. In 2018, the United Arab Emirates signed a strategic partnership agreement with Russia, and by 2021, it had become Russia’s closest partner in the Middle East, with trade turnover between the two countries rising to $9 billion in 2022. Qatari investment in Russia has reached $13 billion. Previously chilly relationships between the Soviet Union and Gulf monarchies, attributable to Soviet support for revolutionary groups and governments in the region, as well as post-Soviet tensions caused by Russia’s war in Chechnya, hydrocarbon market competition, and Putin’s closer ties with Iran, gave way to rapprochement. The Syrian intervention was the catalyst for a durable new Russian role in the Middle East.
Russia’s abandonment of the Assad regime to mobilize more resources in the fight against Ukraine obviously illustrates that Putin is willing to sacrifice everything for overall victory in the war. Although Putin tries to portray himself as a realist, he has become obsessed with Ukraine to the exclusion of almost all other foreign policy imperatives.
In much of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, Russia had managed to sell its war in Ukraine as a fight for a shared cause: a less Western-centric world order, greater independence in and decentralization of the financial system, and the ability to disregard Western criticism of human rights violations and antidemocratic governances perceived by some non-Western countries as hypocritical. Many countries, including China, India, Vietnam, and the ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia, saw opportunities in Russia’s isolation from the West. When Western firms and investors closed up shop in Russia, non-Western players entered the Russian market and helped Russia circumvent sanctions. The fall of Assad will not have an immediate effect on the attempts by these businesses and governments to profit from Russia’s isolation. But the spectacle of a Russian ally’s rapid collapse may change their willingness to align with Russia at the expense of relations with the West.
Russia’s ability to supply military force to its allies meant that its security facilities were needed in both the Middle East and Africa, but the fall of Assad is likely to diminish that need. Russian military bases in Syria, which it may simply lose access to, have allowed it to resupply ships and planes and supply troops in both regions. Without a physical presence in the Middle East, it would be much more difficult. The rebels’ good fortune in Syria also shows the limits of Russia’s security and stability. Being economic Moscow has managed to help Assad regain military and political forces in most of the country, but has proven unable to deal a decisive blow to the resistance in the long term.
Russia has also failed to herald economic progress in Syria or update the Western investments that came to the country in the early years of the Assad regime before the Arab Spring dried up. Syria has never escaped the economic abyss into which it fell during the civil war, when GDP per capita halved or tripled. In the areas controlled by Islamist rebels subsidized by Türkiye, living standards have finally surpassed those of the regions governed by Damascus, subsidized by Russia and Iran. ruled through rebels, it had electricity, fuel, water and much less food shortages. Russia’s overall industry with Syria has never exceeded $700 million a year, less than Turkey’s industry with its relatively small portfolio of rebel-controlled territory.
Russia will eventually triumph over the fall of Assad and the imaginable loss of its army bases in the Mediterranean. The Russians have at all times looked the Syrian expedition with caution and indifference; the concept of sending infantrymen to a remote Muslim country was never popular and evoked memories of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The Russians were content with a small, high-tech, most commonly airborne, war fought with limited floor forces. Media policy of the Syrian intervention has helped shape expectancies about the “special army operation” in Ukraine as a fast victory somewhere far away, a source of fast pride that required few societal sacrifices or the involvement of lay infantrymen. When the invasion was not an prompt success, remote successes in Syria have become an unsightly contrast to the grim truth of the war in Ukraine. As the war enters its 3rd year, Putin has lost some other Syrian success: his citizens’ confidence in Russia’s skill to win wars temporarily thank you to its technological superiority.
Russia, Iran, and many other countries criticize the U. S. military’s interventions as arrogant, ignorant of the local context, and incapable of forming robust regimes or effective security structures. One might have expected Russia, with its role as a counterweight to Western-backed regimes in the Middle East and Iran, a regional heavyweight, to perceive the local dynamics. But they have failed to breathe life into Syria’s economic expansion or attract other countries to Assad’s cause. Investors from the Gulf countries, India and China have failed to flock to Syria under Russian and Iranian security guarantees. Now, when Russia turns to Erdogan to help it evacuate its army and civilian corps of workers from Syria, it finds itself playing the same role it once accused the United States of playing: a country that got rid of the region’s business and dynamics, marginalized by local politics. Players with little interest in the presence of foreigners.
Russia’s focus on the war in Ukraine will help Putin, and Russians as a whole, forget about uncomfortable questions about Syria, such as what happened to the money and resources Russia invested in the country, or why the services of Russian security forces, who now manage the country well. Array has been caught off guard on several occasions: by Ukraine’s preference to resist, by the mutiny of Wagner leader Eugene Prigozhin in June 2023, by last fall’s Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk region, and now by the immediate collapse of the Assad regime. But Russia’s partners elsewhere will be asking those questions. It has become evident that Russia is not capable of providing its allies with military and economic progress while fighting a war, and regimes that in the past looked to Russia will take note. Russia now promotes the narrative that it saved Assad’s life and freedom, fulfilling its promise to spare him Muammar Gaddafi’s fate at Lithrougha. But it is clear that Moscow’s allies expect much more from an exporter of regime stability and security.
Rulers who hope for Russia’s help may be unpleasantly surprised by how quickly it seeks to establish contacts with Syria’s new leaders. Even before Assad’s departure, Russian television stopped calling Hayat Tahrir al-Sham a terrorist organization. More recently, the head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, clearly with Kremlin approval, has proposed removing the “terrorist” label from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the government has allowed the Syrian embassy in Moscow to raise the rebel flag. Now, Moscow is establishing direct contact with the new Syrian government, trying to win its favor by emphasizing that, despite previous attempts to prop up a secular leader against religious fundamentalists, it sees itself as a global bastion of religious conservatism.
Putin attempted to present Russia’s failure in Syria as a victory, saying Russia had prevented the creation of a “terrorist enclave” in the country. But Assad’s fall (and Russia’s indifference to his regime’s collapse) suggests that fears about Syria or any other consumer state have been subjugated through Putin to his overriding fear of inflicting decisive defeat on Ukraine. At the same time, Putin’s decision to prioritize Ukraine should not be interpreted as a complete abandonment of Russian ambitions outside its immediate neighborhood. If anything, the loss of Syria has only increased the risks of war in Ukraine. In Putin’s plan, Ukraine has a turning point in a global struggle between the Western elite and a new order led through Russia: once Ukraine falls, Russia hopes to seize Georgia and any other territory it wants, and sell itself out. again as a vital pattern. to countries around the world. But in the meantime, Moscow’s promises will ring hollow.
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