Pro-Syrian regime protesters hold a banner in Arabic that reads, "Thanks Russia," as they cheer a convoy believed to be transporting Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Damascus, Syria, in 2012. Muzaffar Salman / AP

It might be premature to dub the recent standoff between Russia and the West a renewed Cold War, but there are echoes of the era in Syrian classrooms.

After a brief visit to Damascus last week by Russia’s deputy prime minister, Dmitry Rogozin, Moscow announced that Syria will be making the study of the Russian language mandatory for all children — an odd choice, academically speaking, as the rest of the world scrambles to learn critical languages like English or Mandarin.

"We are being pressured in Ukraine, but look at what is happening in Syria," former Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin said in an address before the Russian parliament, parading the news. “Syria has always been our outpost in the Middle East,” he noted.

The decision to expand Russian-language offerings in Syrian schools was first announced in January, before the crisis in Crimea unfolded but just as murmurs of a renewed “Cold War” mentality in Moscow were beginning over Putin’s plans to fold Ukraine into its Eurasian Customs Union. Russian was to be introduced as an elective for fifth-graders due to “sympathies to Russia and interest in its great culture,” according to a statement [in Arabic] on the Syrian ministry of education’s website.

The casualty of this newfound Russophilia appears to be French, which has been the preferred language of study in Syrian schools since the days of the French mandate there. Given French (and Western) condemnation of the Assad regime's brutal crackdown on what began as a peaceful uprising in 2011, the subtext of this decision was too glaring for even the ministry to ignore: