Can Putin pull off the miracle?

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6. Russia’s bold Syrian adventure

An important recent development in the increasingly complex Middle East imbroglio is Russia’s open military intervention in the Syrian theatre. Moscow has been known to support the Bashar al-Assad regime in all sorts of ways but had refrained from jumping into the fray militarily. It is now conducting aerial bombings of rebel positions, storing and deploying heavy armaments at its naval base in Syria and is even said to have some ground troops for limited operations. Moscow’s justification for this is multi-fold. First, it is doing this at the invitation of the legitimate Syrian government of President Assad. Second, it is doing it to fight terrorism, which the Assad regime has been doing on its own. Third, its timing would appear to be dictated by the seemingly imminent danger to the Assad regime from multiple jihadi and rebel forces converging on it.

For Moscow, even though Islamic State (IS) is the main target, it is pointless to be splitting hairs to determine who is who among the jihadis because, in the end, they are all terrorists wanting to create an even bigger blood bath of their presumed enemies. They are also a threat to Russia and its interests as some among them are former Chechen rebels and commanders now fighting for IS and other jihadi groups. Russia would hate them and IS to score even more gains, with the prospect of some of the Chechen rebels and their new compatriots returning to settle old scores with the Russian state. Therefore, it is not simply bravado on Russia’s part to help the Assad regime, it is also in its self-interest to deal with them as far away from the country as is possible.

There is also an important geopolitical reason: President Putin has never forgotten and forgiven the collapse of the Soviet state as a global power. He called it the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. Its shrunken version, the Russian state he has been presiding over for much of the new century, has been facing further pressures to constrict and constrain its role, including a perceived threat from an expanded NATO that now also includes some eastern European and Baltic countries that were either once under the protective Soviet umbrella or its integral part. This led Moscow to push back when Ukraine was sought to be included in the European Union, with the prospect of its subsequent inclusion in NATO. The crisis in Ukraine is still unresolved for which Russia is facing a slew of economic sanctions from the US and its European allies.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/14-Oct-2015/russia-s-bold-syrian-adventure