They see Russia as trying to avert the collapse of the Assad government for as long as it can while it establishes its most important foothold in the Middle East in decades. That military presence in Syria could remain in place even if Mr. Assad is eventually supplanted by a new government, because Russia would be a part of any transition talks. And if Russia, in the middle of all of this maneuvering, can also damage the Islamic State, then so much the better for Moscow.
.. the very first warplanes that Russia sent to Latakia were four SU-30 Flanker air-to-air fighters. Such aircraft, officials said, would be useful in expanding Russia’s military reach in the Middle East and perhaps in dissuading foes of Mr. Assad from even contemplating the establishment of a no-fly zone over Syria.
.. “First of all, I think that Russia very much wants to be seen as an equal on the world stage,” he said. Next, Moscow “wants to take the world’s eyes away from what they’re doing in Ukraine.”
Its other goals include maintaining “warm-water ports and airfield capabilities in the eastern Mediterranean” and prolonging the Assad government.
“And then, after all that,” he said, “they will do some counter-ISIL work in order to legitimize their approach in Syria.”
John Kerry Rushes In Where Obama Will Not Tread
“The president is at peace determining that something is just a loser, that if he touches it, he’s going to make it worse. Whereas Kerry has the typical American engineering approach to things — there’s a problem, there’s a way to fix it, somehow.”
.. “I wouldn’t rule out the idea that Kerry has the same intellectual view of it as Obama but feels his role as secretary of state is to try anyway,” said Paul R. Pillar, a scholar at Georgetown University and retired senior C.I.A. official.
Russia Surprises U.S. With Accord on Battling ISIS
The effort, which Mr. Putin is expected to underscore in his speech at the United Nations on Monday, not only puts Moscow in a position to give military support to Mr. Assad, its longtime ally in the Middle East, but could also enable the Kremlin to influence the choice of a successor if Mr. Assad were to eventually leave power.
Putin’s Next Target: The Baltics?
Under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, an “armed attack” on one Nato member is to be regarded as an attack on all. Fine words, but the challenge for Nato is to ensure that they are never put to the test. For his part, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin knows that there is no better place than the Baltics—nearby, lightly defended, far from the Nato core and with a large Russian minority—to try his luck.
.. Moscow’s geopolitical aims are more modest, too: it believes that the US just has to accept that its current dominance must be replaced by a humbler role in a “multipolar” world in which Russia is treated with the respect it thinks it deserves. With respect would come the realisation of Moscow’s second objective: recognition that Russia has a legitimate extraterritorial sphere of interest, much of it encompassed within a loosely defined “Russian World” (Russkiy Mir) that includes most or all of the post-Soviet space, including, to a greater or lesser extent, the Baltics, the three renegade states that made it all the way from the USSR to Nato.
.. When, in 2005, Putin notoriously referred to the collapse of the Soviet Union as “a major geopolitical disaster of the century,” he was not mourning the Communist Party, but rather the fact that “tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory,” a theme that, tellingly, he alluded to in a major speech shortly after the annexation of the Crimea. Trying to repair, at least partly, that breach through the creation of his “Russian world” is much more than a matter of poking Washington: it is a central element in his foreign policy and, critically, a key source of domestic support.
.. The Baltic’s Russian-speakers receive most of their news from Russia’s poisonous media (which reserves plenty of venom for supposedly fascist Russophobic Balts). Nevertheless, while they appear to be generally supportive of Moscow’s adventures abroad, they seem to have little appetite for being “rescued” by their compatriots: the devastation in Donetsk has only sharpened their awareness of what that could mean.
.. But according to the Czech General, Petr Pavel, speaking shortly before he became the head of Nato’s Military Committee in June, 48 hours is how long it would take the Russians to occupy the Baltic states, establishing a fait accompli that would present the west with some very difficult decisions. What the Balts are hoping for are troops who are already there, a tripwire akin to the US presence in South Korea.