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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 Russia to emerge from the foreign isolation it suffered after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. He sought to return Russia to a position of influence in the Middle East, where its presence had been reduced after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And it sought to make Russia a global force capable of supporting its allies and impeding efforts to overthrow friendly governments. The intervention in Syria also allowed Russia to assume the role of protector of Christians in the Middle East – a role that Putin said had been abdicated by decadent Western forces, and a project that fits perfectly with Putin’s preference to provide Russia as Europe’s last bastion. Christian values.
In the wake of the rapid 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 showed little concern for the Syrian Christians it claimed to protect as Assad’s secular government was toppled by the Islamist organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. And Russia’s isolation from the international community has only intensified since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
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 linked to Ukraine. Moscow perceived the Arab Spring in the 2010s as extensions of the Maidan protests in Kyiv and the “color revolutions” that had rocked post-Soviet countries a decade earlier—all of which Putin saw as possible rehearsals for an eventual bid to topple his own regime. Outwardly, of course, Putin framed Russia’s intervention in Syria as a counterterrorism operation. Although the West rejected Russia’s overture of partnership against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) in Syria, it accepted the reality of Russia’s involvement in the war against a common—or at least overlapping—enemy. The United States, Turkey, and several Gulf states established military communications channels with Russia, which ceased to be discussed solely as an international pariah, as it had after its 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 US objections and racing to circumvent foreign sanctions. Putin has also not hesitated to interact in talks with Turkey about its support for Syrian insurgent forces, going so far as to impose sanctions on industry opposed to Ankara. However, his military intervention did not lead to a confrontation with regional Sunni states as Putin did. The critics had predicted. Although Russian-Turkish relations waver between hostility and friendship (Putin subsidized Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a 2016 coup attempt), the Gulf states have demonstrated Moscow’s reputation for military might in a complicated standoff that in the past had proven difficult to manage. Assad has rejoined 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 convincing generation investor or exporter, outside of nuclear plant construction and weapons supply. But his 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 Wagner paramilitary company, 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 present himself as a realist, his interest in Ukraine excludes almost all foreign policy imperatives.
In much of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, Russia has managed to sell its war in Ukraine as a fight for a common cause: a less Western-centered global order, greater independence and decentralization of the monetary system, and the ability to forget about Western complaints about human rights abuses and undemocratic governments perceived as hypocritical by some non-Western countries. Many countries, including China, India, Vietnam, and the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, saw opportunities in Russia’s policy. isolation from the West. When Western corporations and investors closed their doors in Russia, non-Western actors entered the Russian market and helped Russia circumvent sanctions. Assad’s fall will have an immediate effect on attempts by those corporations and governments to take advantage of Russia’s isolation. But the spectacle of a Russian ally’s rapid relinquishment may simply adjust its willingness to align with Russia at the expense of relations with the West.
Russia’s ability to provide military strength to its allies meant that its security facilities were needed in both the Middle East and Africa, but the fall of Assad risks reducing this need. Russian army bases in Syria, which it could lose access to, have allowed it to refuel ships and planes and send troops to both regions. Without a physical presence in the Middle East, this would be much more difficult. The rebels’ good fortune in Syria also shows the limits of Russia’s security and economic supply to its allies around the world. Moscow managed to help Assad regain military and political power in most of the country, but proved unable to deal a decisive blow to the resistance in the long term.
Russia also failed to promote economic development in Syria or to replace the Western investment that flooded into the country in the early years of Assad’s rule before drying up during the Arab Spring. Syria never escaped the economic black hole into which it fell during the civil war, when per capita GDP decreased two- to threefold. In areas controlled by Islamist rebels backed by Turkey, living standards eventually surpassed those in the regions ruled by Damascus backed by Russia and Iran. Rebel-run Idlib had electricity, fuel, water, and far fewer food shortages. Russia’s total trade with Syria never exceeded $700 million a year, less than Turkey’s trade with the relatively tiny pockets of rebel-held territory.
Russia will ultimately weather the fall of Assad and the possible loss of its military bases in the Mediterranean. Russians have always viewed the Syrian expedition with caution and indifference; the idea of sending soldiers to a distant Muslim country was never popular and evoked memories of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Russians were content with a small, high-tech, primarily air war conducted with limited forces on the ground. Coverage of the Syrian intervention helped shape expectations for the “special military operation” in Ukraine as a swift victory somewhere far away, a quick source of pride that required few societal sacrifices or the involvement of nonprofessional soldiers. When the invasion was not an immediate success, the distant successes in Syria became an unpleasant contrast to the grim reality of the war in Ukraine. As the war enters its third year, Putin has lost yet another Syrian success: his citizens’ confidence in Russia’s ability to swiftly win wars through technological superiority.
Russia, Iran, and many other countries criticize U.S. military interventions as arrogant, ignorant of local context, and unable to fashion either stable regimes or effective security structures. Russia, with its role as a counterweight to Western-backed regimes in the Middle East, and Iran, a regional heavyweight, might have been expected to understand local dynamics. But they failed to foster economic growth in Syria and attract others to Assad’s cause. Investors from Gulf countries, India, and China did not flock to Syria under Russian and Iranian security guarantees. Now, as Russia turns to Erdogan for help in evacuating its military and civilian personnel from Syria, it finds itself playing the very role it once accused the United States of playing: a country distant from the region’s affairs and dynamics, pushed out by local political players uninterested in the presence of outsiders.
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.
Leaders hoping for help from Russia would likely be unpleasantly surprised by how temporarily it tries to make contact with Syria’s new leaders. Even before Assad left office, Russian television had stopped calling Hayat Tahrir al-Sham a terrorist organization. More recently, the head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, obviously with the approval of the Kremlin, proposed removing Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s “terrorist” label and authorizing the government to raise the insurgent flag. Now Moscow is identifying direct contact with the new Syrian government, seeking to curry favor with it by emphasizing that, despite past attempts to achieve a secular leader opposed to devout fundamentalists, it sees itself as a global bastion of devout conservatism.
Putin has tried to present Russia’s failure in Syria as a victory, claiming that Russia had prevented the creation of a “terrorist enclave” in the country. But Assad’s fall (and Russia’s indifference to the collapse of his regime) suggests that concern for Syria or any other client state has been subjugated by Putin to his overriding focus on dealing Ukraine a decisive defeat. At the same time, Putin’s decision to prioritize Ukraine should not be taken for a complete abandonment of Russian ambitions outside its immediate neighborhood. Rather, the loss of Syria has simply raised the stakes of the war in Ukraine. In Putin’s schema, Ukraine has become a tipping point in a global struggle between the Western elite and a new, Russian-led order: once Ukraine falls, Russia hopes to take Georgia and whatever other territory it desires, and to once again sell itself as a strong patron to countries around the world. In the meantime, however, Moscow’s promises will ring hollow.
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