IN DECEMBER last year Vladimir Putin used a surprise visit to Syria to declare that Russia’s mission there was “basically accomplished”. His troops had saved the regime of Bashar al-Assad. And Russia had played the decisive part in a conflict that America had failed to control. Coming after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, his message was clear. Russia is back.

Just ten weeks later, Mr Putin’s boast looks premature. Within a few hours last weekend Iran first sent a large surveillance drone from deep inside Syria into Israeli airspace and Israel responded by shooting it down and destroying its controlling infrastructure near Palmyra. When an Israeli F-16 fighter jet, on its way home from the raid, was brought down by a salvo of Syrian air-defence missiles, Israel hit back by destroying around a third of Syria’s anti-aircraft batteries. Russian military advisers may have been among those killed.

The skirmishes hold two messages. Far from winding down, the war in Syria is entering a new and possibly more dangerous phase. And while fighting rages, Russia must stay.

Easy in, hard out

The air strikes were the most significant Israel has carried out in Syria since 1982. Neither Iran nor Israel, despite their bitter enmity, wants all-out war, but each is testing where the other’s limits lie. Fresh confrontations have become a near-certainty now that the Assad regime and the Iranian-backed militias that are its most effective ground troops have pushed rebel groups out of an area close to the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. Israeli commanders say they are braced for attacks launched by Iran from a growing number of bases in Syria.

This puts Russia in a bind. An escalating conflict between Israel and Iran itself may force it to choose sides. Russia and Iran have become close allies in saving Mr Assad. Yet Mr Putin and Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, who is fighting for his political career (see article), are also on cordial terms. Russia has acquiesced in Israeli strikes on Iran’s Hizbullah proxy, as long as they did not threaten the regime’s survival.

Although Mr Putin poses as the arbiter of Syria’s fate and the convener of the peace process, he has little control over other actors, with their own competing agendas. Russian-sponsored peace talks last month in Sochi were a flop. Barely any opposition representatives showed up and the delegation from Damascus rejected calls from the UN and Russia itself for a new constitution. Tension between the other co-sponsors of the conference, Iran and Turkey, reached breaking point when Iranian-backed militias shelled a Turkish convoy in Syria with Russia’s reluctant consent. Turkey and the Syrian Kurds, both of whom Russia has wooed, are now at each other’s throats. Mr Putin attempted to dissuade his Turkish opposite number, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, from charging in, but was ignored.

Meanwhile, casualty-averse Russian voters are wearying of the war. A recent poll suggested that less than a third support continuing military operations. Their mood will not have been helped by reports that scores of Russian contract soldiers may have been killed fighting American-led anti-Islamic State forces in eastern Syria last week. The Kremlin would dearly love to find an exit. But that looks a remote prospect.

Russia achieved a lot in Syria with a small commitment of forces, but it now finds that it is too weak to bang heads together. It may be too soon to talk of Russia getting stuck in a Syrian quagmire, as Barack Obama once glibly predicted, but Mr Putin looks a long way from being able to extricate himself.

If Russia’s Syria gambit unravels, America should take little comfort. The myopic policy shared by both Mr Obama and President Donald Trump of seeing Syria almost solely in terms of defeating Islamic State has left America without influence there against Iran and torn between Turkey, its prickly NATO ally, and its most effective ground forces, the Syrian Kurds.

Russia is finding the going more difficult than it thought. America has made itself, at best, peripheral. Meanwhile, the suffering of ordinary Syrians drags remorselessly on.