Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 1 – On the first
anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s decision to introduce Russian forces into the
Syrian civil war on the side of Baghdad dictator Bashar al-Assad, commentators
in Russia and Ukraine are pointing to ways in which this conflict recalls
Moscow’s earlier interventions in Chechnya and before that in Afghanistan.
Their conclusions should be
disturbing to all people of good will around the world given the brutality of
Soviet and Russian actions in those wars, but they should also serve as a
warning to Russia and Russians given that such
military adventures did not end well for their authors or their authors’
country, however many victories Kremlin propagandists may claim.
Independent Russian military analyst
Pavel Felgengauer notes that in Aleppo, “the Russians are using the Chechen
tactic of the period of the second Chechen war” when they destroyed civilian
areas in cities in order to defeat their military opponent in the field (politolog.net/analytics/kreml-ispolzuet-taktiku-chechenskoj-vojny-voennyj-ekspert/).
Whether this
constitutes “’a war crime,’” the analyst says, is up to an international
tribunal; but of course, if it is found to be such in one case, it could easily
be extended to others.
Russian military commanders believe
that if they can take Aleppo, “this will be a decisive victory” in the Syrian
civil war, one that will give Asad a victory and make Baghdad into what was
true in Chechnya after the second Chechen war, a pro-Russian vassal that will
help project Moscow’s power in the region.
But, Felgengauer argues, Moscow is
wrong. Taking Aleppo by such massive and indiscriminate use of force may be
possible, but that will not lead to the end of the civil war in Syria. That
conflict will “in any case” continue; and even more people will die there as a
result of the actions of Assad and his Russian allies.
Meanwhile,
Ukrainian journalist Vladislav Kudrik compares what Putin is doing in Syria
with what his Soviet predecessors did in Afghanistan, a conflict that
undermined the USSR, led to a Soviet withdrawal, but didn’t solve the problem of
that Central Asian country (apostrophe.ua/article/world/middle-east/2016-10-01/afganskiy-sindrom-putina-chto-pokazal-god-siriyskoy-avantyuryi/7543).
At
the moment, he says, many experts believe that Russia has “outplayed the West,”
but most of them see this as a short-term rather than long-term result because, in the view of many of them, “Syria
is becoming for Moscow a new Afghanistan,” a place it cannot withdraw from
without risks at home and abroad but that it cannot gain what it hoped for
either.
Moscow’s
main goal in going into Syria was to force the West and above all the US to
make a trade, with the West paying for Russian cooperation against terrorism in
the Middle East with an agreement to end sanctions against the Russian
Federation for what Putin is doing in Ukraine.
But if that was Moscow’s goal, it has clearly failed.
Its
actions have increasingly infuriated the West, which has stepped up its
criticism of what Moscow is doing with its bombing of civilians in Aleppo,
threatened to break off all talks on Syrian issues, and even to introduce new
economic sanctions against Russia. Most
important, the West has refused to make any grand bargain with Putin.
What
is worse for Moscow, experts like Igor Semivolos, the director of Kyiv’s Center
for Near East Research, say, is that Moscow has little choice but to keep
fighting despite the increasing costs it is imposing on itself by that
policy. “In authoritarian regimes,”
Semivolos note, “defeat in war usually very quickly leads to the fall of the regime.”
Moscow
is thus caught in a trap of its own making, incapable of winning either on the
ground or in diplomacy but equally unwilling to take the risks involved of
pulling out entirely. Russian leaders know what happened after Gorbachev pulled
out of Afghanistan, and they don’t want the same outcome.
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