Putin’s Ambitions for the War Against ISIS
Why the lag in announcing what seemed increasingly certain? Most likely, Putin and his advisers simply didn’t know how to react—and when Putin doesn’t like his options he tends to stall for time. (That is one advantage of an authoritarian system: there is no legislature or opposition party, and little pressure from the media, to force a decision.)
.. Had the Kremlin acknowledged that the plane was blown up by ISIS, as an affiliate of the group claimed in the days after the disaster, it would have demonstrated exactly the sort of cause-and-effect it has been trying to avoid in its Syria war.
.. He is a adherent of Yalta-era geopolitics, in which states achieve victory together and then sit down to carve up the world. And he wants today’s global powers to form an alliance similar to the one that defeated Nazism.
.. But Putin’s Syria policy was always only partially about Syria. It was also about Ukraine, where Putin is loath to give up his ability to dial tensions down or up at will to get what he wants from Kiev and its Western backers. He presumably would like to keep that instrument without having to pay for it.
.. Above all, in Syria, Putin seeks to extend Russia’s influence, both in the Middle East and globally, with his country granted the kind of superpower status that he sees as its birthright.