“Moscow has yet to stop the Assad regime’s horrific practice of barrel bombing the Syrian people,” she said. “We know that Russia’s primary intent is to preserve the regime.”

“Moscow has cynically tried to claim that its strikes are focused on terrorists, but so far, 85 to 90 percent of Syrian strikes have hit the moderate Syrian opposition, and they have killed civilians in the process,” Ms. Patterson said at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday morning.

Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Anne Patterson cited the figure in congressional testimony as evidence that the real goal of Russia’s campaign is to prop up Syrian President Bashar Assad, whom the Obama administration has sought the removal of for the past four years.

We’ve known a simple fact since the start of Russia’s air campaign in Syria — bombing ISIS is simply not a priority. If we take Russia’s word on what locations it has bombed, we see that most of Russia’s bombs are falling in areas where ISIS is simply not present. Then there is the possibility that Russia is overstating its strikes within territory where ISIS exists.

The Institute For The Study Of War provides this useful snapshot of what Russia is actually bombing, according to their own analysis:

But perhaps most concerning are new statements by the Commander of NATO,

US General Philip Breedlove, who stressed that Russia, far from being a

viable partner in world affairs, in fact behaves like an adversary:

In NPR’s interview, Breedlove stresses that the US and Russia have very different goals in Syria:

“We [Russia and the US] are not cooperating. We have developed a safety regime with them to ensure the de-confliction of our aircraft, et cetera, in the sky. But cooperation is not the word. … What I would say is that we have developed the regimens and the procedures to allow us not to come into contact and when we do, how we handle that, how we communicate, how we operate, the things that we do and don’t do to be – so as to not look bellicose. … …We clearly know who we’re attacking. We’re attacking ISIL. As you know, Russia announced when they went in that they were attacking ISIL. But we saw that their rhetoric was not matching their actions. I have seen Russia’s own publicly categorized data on this. One could derive that they’re hitting about 80 percent non-ISIL targets. I actually think the number is higher than that. But the bottom line is that clearly their main effort is not against ISIL. Their main effort is against the moderate opposition. And in effect, that provides a little bit of de-confliction in the area anyway. We are bombing ISIL where ISIL is. And they’re bombing the moderate opposition where the moderate opposition is.

Breedlove also stressed that the only way to understand what Putin is thinking is to watch carefully what he is doing. In this sense, Breelove describes a method similar to what we at The Interpreter use — to study the facts on the ground in places like Ukraine and Syria, rather than speculate about what Putin is thinking based on other models:

I really don’t think anyone truly understands what Mr. Putin is about. And I’m suspect when someone walks up to me and says, Mr. Putin wants this or Mr. Putin wants that. We watch the capabilities and the capacities that he builds in these places. And from those capabilities and capacities, we can deduce what he might want to do. And so we looked at the force he built up when he went into Crimea. We look at the force that he has built up in Syria. And we take a look at that and deduce that he can take the following actions or make the following influence. And that’s how I try to determine where Mr. Putin might be headed.

The entire interview can be read and listened to here: