Putin's escalating Syria involvement: A weapon pointed at European unity? [View all]
Various news sources have been reporting recently that Russia is building up its military involvement in Syria on behalf of the Assad regime. The alliance between the two is nothing new, but in light of recent consequences of the Syrian civil war - namely, the large and rapidly growing waves of refugee emigration to Europe, which are driving internal political divisions in the EU - one has to wonder just how darkly cynical Putin's agenda in Syria may become.
As a regime characterized by "divide and conquer" strategy - employed most conspicuously in the manufacture of a civil war in Ukraine seemingly out of thin air to enable and justify the annexation of major territories - the political strains in Europe caused by the migration crisis cannot have escaped Kremlin attention.
The authoritarian government of Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, who was already a squeaky wheel on European sanctions against Russia, has been the loudest and most vehement critic of permissive Northern European attitudes toward asylum-seekers. Meanwhile the brutality, naked xenophobia, and rampant corruption of the Hungarian response to the crisis has caused Western EU members to reevaluate their view of Hungary given its radical deviations from stated EU values.
Is it beyond the depravity of the Putin regime to deliberately escalate the horrors in Syria in order to unleash greater migrations and further increase political tensions within the EU? Or, even if not, is that actually his intention? We have now seen multiple examples of Putin's strategy of unleashing chaos as a means of proxy war. Is this another example of it?
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