In his latest conference in Paris, President Obama once again slammed Russia for not embracing US demands to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad from power, saying it would lead Russia to be bogged down in a “new Afghanistan.

“I think Mr. Putin understands that, with Afghanistan fresh in the memory for him, to simply get bogged down in an inconclusive and paralyzing civil conflict is not the outcome that he’s looking for,” Obama insisted.

Syrian rebel factions have predicted Russia would face an open-ended war akin to its 1979 occupation of Afghanistan, though the US had previously avoided this comparison, what with their own open-ended occupation of Afghanistan still ongoing for over 14 years.

Obama predicted Putin would eventually come to realize that the US was right all along, and remove Assad from power. Secretary of State John Kerry, in a separate statement, predicted ISIS would be destroyed in a matter of months after Assad’s ouster.