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Earlier this month, veteran Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad resigned and fled to Moscow in the face of a lightning insurgent advance toward the capital, Damascus. Assad’s faltering dictatorship has been successfully propped up by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s continued military intervention in the Syrian civil war. But with Russia still mired in its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, a war that will enter its fourth year in February, Putin can no longer do without the forces needed to keep Assad in power.
Russia is a much stronger state than post-uprising Syria, but Assad’s sudden and unforeseen downfall has to worry Putin, whose own hold on power has persevered through years of war, economic sanctions and international isolation. And while U.S. President-elect Donald Trump was expected to pressure Ukraine to accept peace terms that include ceding territory to Russia, the nomination of the relatively hawkish Sen. Marco Rubio as Secretary of State suggests that the new Trump administration might not be as friendly to Putin as he had hoped. Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine grinds on, while Putin has had to rely on military reinforcements from North Korea, forging “a marriage of convenience or even a marriage of desperation,” said Bruce W. Bennett at RAND.
The Russian economy is also beginning to groan under the weight of long-term sanctions and their wartime anchorage. While “the Russian economy has defied expectations” since the start of the war in Ukraine, even recording significant GDP growth, Putin is suffering. “manage a war economy” that is suffering to combat “rising inflation, sanctions and record defence spending”. With inflation hovering around 9% and interest rates rising to 23%, even Putin has been forced to admit “that the country’s economy economy is overheating,” CNBC said.
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David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the book It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. He is a regular contributor to Informed Comment and his work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, Christian Science Monitor, and Indy Week.