In difficult times, Russians admire proud, ambitious leaders, those willing to establish Russian power and influence in distant places. No one knows that better than Putin.

A year ago next month, when Bashar Assad’s brutal struggle against his people had already made him the most hated dictator in the world, Russia decided to enter the Syrian civil war on his side. It was one of the most unpleasant surprises of our time, and one of the hardest to understand.

Just as it became popular to hope that Assad would lose soon to the rebel forces and retire from history in ignominy, President Vladimir Putin decided that the man deserved his support.

Distroscale

Despite the fact that Assad had provoked a war that cost 250,000 lives and sprayed sarin nerve-gas on the suburbs of Damascus, Putin understood. He decided Assad was being attacked by terrorists, as even Russia had been beset by Chechen rebels. Putin decided that he, and perhaps only he, saw the justice in Assad’s claim that he was just doing his best to save Syria from anarchy.

This was Russia’s first major intrusion into the Syrian region since June, 1772, when Russians bombarded and conquered Beirut, a fortress on the coast of Ottoman Syria. Just as today, Russia was backing a vicious despot.

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For Putin it seems to be working, at least at the moment. Russia established an airport on Syrian soil, with barracks capable of holding 2,000 or so personnel. Soon Russian planes were bombing and weakening rebel positions. The course of the war changed and Assad’s poisonous regime looked likely to endure. Recently Iran (a Syrian ally) allowed Russian bombers to take off from an Iranian airport on a sortie into Syria. When it was over, Iranian official statements carried a firm message: that’s the last time. But Putin’s influence was still growing.

Putin did not find his new client state, Syria, obedient. The United Nations called for a cease-fire and Russia was one of the 20 states (including the United States) behind a meeting to set the terms. They agreed on a “cessation of hostilities agreement,” which turned out to mean “time for Assad to keep stalling.” He had no intention of signing a truce with people who were trying to kill him. On this point, the failure to sign, Putin seems to believe that as a client state Syria was not showing a proper degree of gratitude.

Still, why did he intervene in a place far from Russia when he was already in a proxy war with Ukraine? It’s been said often that he was trying to secure access to Syria’s deep-water port at Tartus, but would that justify risking lives, treasure and his reputation?

Or was he trying for something larger, such as regaining the great-power status that was lost during the Gorbachev-Yeltsin eras?

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Hard as this may be to believe, Russia has a more or less permanent feeling that it is not as large as it should be. Often Russians feel as if surrounded by potential enemies — as, in the communist era, when they talked about being “encircled by capitalism.”

Peter the Great, czar from 1682 till his death in 1725, has been admired ever since for the successful wars he fought to expand Russia. Stalin still retains some Russian admirers (and a relatively gentle treatment in Russian schoolbooks) because at his death in 1953 Moscow’s power encompassed most of eastern Europe and a vast collection of multi-ethnic and multi-language provinces in the U.S.S.R.

In difficult times, such as the present (when oil prices have fallen disastrously), Russians admire proud, ambitious leaders, those willing to establish Russian power and influence in distant places. No one knows that better than Putin.

On RT, the Russian government’s English-language TV network, Syria is still being treated as an ally. This week, RT has been interviewing, with the greatest deference, a spokesman from the Syrian ministry of information. Since the Assad government is to be treated as a still-legitimate state, the man from the ministry on Wednesday said that the Turkish troops that recently crossed the Syrian border should go home immediately.

More recently, Putin has been taking on the greatest problem in the Middle East, apparently believing that his status can solve it. The president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, having talked recently to Putin, said this week that Putin wants to revive peace talks between the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He’s invited them to meet in Moscow. If that were to work, and Putin were to succeed where a string of American presidents had failed, no one could ever again deny that Russia is a great power.

National Post

robert.fulford@utoronto.ca