The Mythical Alliance: Russia’s Syria Policy

And it certainly has not. As of January 2013, Syrian rebels and Syrian government forces have reached a temporary stalemate on the battlefield. The rebels gained much ground toward the end of 2012 but are not yet capable of defeating the regime, and both sides are resolutely pursuing the goal of full military victory. The Syrian people, caught in the cross fire, are bleeding, losing numerous lives every day. Many Syrians are certainly opposed to the Assad regime, but many also fear the victory of the rebels. In the two years since the start of the uprising, the Syrian army has not disintegrated, nor have the merchant classes of war-devastated Aleppo and the semi-besieged capital Damascus risen up against the regime.

Moscow’s attitude toward the developments in Syria certainly has been informed by the lessons it learned in Libya, but Russians are no strangers to Syria. From the 1960s to the early 1990s, Moscow maintained close, quasi-alliance relations with Damascus, ruled from 1970 until 2000 by Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father. In 1980, Moscow and Damascus signed a treaty that provided for consultation in case of a threat to peace and for military cooperation.

During the second half of the twentieth century, Syria was second only to Egypt in importance among the Arab countries involved in the conflict with Israel—a conflict that was a key expression of the broader Cold War standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States. As a result, for a quarter century following the 1967 Six-Day War in which Israel wrested control of the Golan Heights away from Syria, the Soviet Union supported Damascus politically, economically, and, above all, militarily.

Even though Hafez al-Assad heavily depended on the USSR, he remained a full master in his own house and in Syria’s own “near abroad.” In 1976, Syrian forces invaded Lebanon, and they remained there for thirty years. In 1982, Assad’s troops crushed an uprising in the Syrian city of Homs with the reported loss of 20,000 lives. The Soviets may have at times lamented the senior Assad’s willful behavior, but he was their safest bet in the region.

When then Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat “defected” to the American camp in 1972, Syria became the de facto main Soviet ally in the Middle East and held that position until 1991. Not only were virtually all its weapons Soviet made, but Syria also hosted up to 6,000 Soviet military advisers and technicians as well as civilian personnel and dependents. Tens of thousands of Syrian students graduated from Soviet universities, colleges, and military academies, and many of them also married Soviet citizens.

Even after the breakup of the Soviet Union, a number of military advisers, now representing the Russian Federation, continued to lend their services to the Syrian government. Tartus, a Syrian port that during the Cold War was used by the Soviet Navy’s Fifth Mediterranean Squadron, became Russia’s only naval resupply facility outside the former Soviet Union. Moscow continued to arm Syria—even though in order to sell new weapons to Damascus, it had to forgive $10 billion of Syria’s $13 billion Soviet-era debt in 2005.

Yet, Damascus was not Russia’s “last remaining ally in the Middle East” as many commentators have recently called it. Moscow simply withdrew from geopolitical competition in the region as early as 1990. Then, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze turned away from their other ally, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which had invaded and annexed Kuwait, allowing a U.S.-led coalition to defeat Saddam’s forces in the first Gulf War. In the fall of 1991, just before the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, Moscow restored diplomatic relations with Israel and “rebalanced” its approach to the Palestinian issue.²

Ever since, Russia’s presence in the region has been guided by a combination of commercial interests, concerns about the support that comes from the region for insurgents and terrorists in Russia’s North Caucasus, and the newly discovered spiritual attractions of the Holy Land and the more mundane beaches of the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Gulf. Two figures tell the story of the metamorphosis of Moscow’s presence in the region better than anything else. When Anwar al-Sadat switched Egypt’s allegiance from Moscow to Washington, he sent home no fewer than 20,000 Soviet military advisers. When Hosni Mubarak, Sadat’s heir, was toppled in a revolution almost forty years later, over 40,000 Russian holidaymakers were stranded in Hurghada, Sharm el-Sheikh, and other Egyptian resorts. Revolution or not, they continued with their vacations.

Four Layers of Moscow’s Position on Syria

Russia’s approach to Syria is best analyzed at four levels, in diminishing importance: calculations based on the changing international order, the effects of the Arab Spring, the material interests in Syria, and the role of religion.

The International Order

At level one comes Russia’s concern about the international order. Russian officials often refer to the United Nations Charter, in particular its support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of UN member states. While the Soviet Union often only paid lip service to the UN Charter, relying instead on its military power and politico-ideological control over its vast global empire, the much smaller Russian Federation, no longer revolutionary or a superpower, really sees the Security Council and traditional international law as a bulwark of the world order. Moscow insists that the Security Council should focus on matters related to the maintenance of international peace and security. Thus, it should abstain from supporting parties in an internal conflict, such as in Syria.

But Russia accepts, in principle, the gradual and consensual change of international law. It formally recognizes the responsibility to protect—that is, the principle that human rights considerations can make a military intervention by the UN or one of its members necessary. Moscow actually referred to the doctrine during the brief war with Georgia in 2008, which it ostensibly fought in defense of the South Ossetian population.

Even when the intervention on humanitarian grounds is duly approved, the military operation, in Moscow’s view, should be confined to protecting civilians, not changing the regime or helping the armed opposition fighting the regime. There should be no “mission creep” into outright involvement in a local civil war. “We are not in the business of regime change,” and the Security Council “does not deal with revolutions,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov declared.³ To the Russians’ credit, their own brief operation in Georgia in 2008, while stepping out of the conflict zones in South Ossetia and Abkhazia into Georgia proper, did not lead to a march on Tbilisi and the toppling of the Georgian government, as many in the West feared—and some in Russia definitely wanted—at the time.

The Russians are also adamant that there shall be no use of force or threat of such use, except when the UN Security Council, where Moscow has the right of veto, decides otherwise. Failure to seek, or obtain, such a mandate makes an intervention illegal, in Russia’s view. And Moscow insists that the use of force in international relations should be not only mandated but also closely overseen and supervised by the Security Council throughout the operation.

Russia does seem to acknowledge exceptions to that rule. In South Ossetia, Russia acted without an international mandate, implying that in certain cases Moscow believes intervention may be urgent and justified even without a green light from the UN Security Council. Then military action becomes a matter of political choice laden with international political and legal consequences.

Russia abhors in particular the liberal use of force by the United States. As a permanent, veto-wielding member of the Security Council, Russia has the ability to protect its immediate interests and ensure a more predictable international environment. In broader terms, ideal world governance, in Moscow’s view, is built on a great-power consensus: exactly the Rooseveltian idea of four global policemen. The vaunted “multipolarity” is just the most recent iteration of the concept first embodied in the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe, within which the Russian Empire felt quite at ease.

Syria, from the Kremlin’s perspective, is just another case where the West is in the business of regime change. In Iraq, the United States invaded to topple Saddam Hussein. Iran has long lived under a similar threat. In Yugoslavia, NATO’s air war led to the separation of Kosovo from Serbia; Slobodan Milosevic was overthrown shortly thereafter, in a first of what would be known as the color revolutions. Most recently, in Libya, the Kremlin first chose not to oppose a “no-fly zone” to save innocent lives but was later angered as the humanitarian operation morphed into the familiar regime change.

The Arab Spring

At level two, there is the Russian government’s assessment of the domestic developments in Syria and, more widely, of the Arab Spring, which put an end to Mubarak’s dictatorial rule and led to the overthrow of the authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Yemen, and Libya. From the very start, Russian Middle East watchers have been markedly less upbeat than their Western counterparts about the nature and direction of change in the region. What most of them see can be termed a “Great Islamist Revolution.”⁴ While Europeans and Americans saw in the Arab world a repeat of Europe’s democratic upheavals of 1848 or 1989, the Russians drew parallels to their own of 1917—the only question was which month would be the equivalent of Red October.

Early on, Russian policymakers feared an Islamist takeover would follow the overthrow of secular authoritarians. They regarded Western countries and pro-Western liberals in the Arab countries as paving the way for religious radicals or al-Qaeda allies. For Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, references to the Arab Spring and democracy in this context were “baby talk.”⁵

There was almost no jubilation in Russian society at the “people’s victories” in Egypt and Tunisia, which had become tourist attractions to many Russians (2.8 million Russian holidaymakers went to Egypt in 2010 and 2.5 million in 2012). Political freedom is one thing, but economic well-being is another, and bitter disappointment is just a matter of time, skeptical Russian observers reasoned. Moreover, freedom in an immature society gives an advantage to the strongest and most ruthless. Russian state-owned television richly supplied its viewers with pictures of the unfolding political drama, particularly in Cairo, where the voices of hope and aspiration were intermingled with those of fear and despair.

The message the Russian viewers received was that even those revolutions that do not end in civil wars—such as in Egypt and Tunisia—mean death and destruction and result in chaos, which can lead to an even more brutal regime than the one they did away with. To the Russian audience, sufficiently aware of their own country’s history in the last century, this was often a compelling argument. In Libya, where liberals rather than Islamists emerged victorious at the polls in 2012, the issue the Russians raised was the plunder by revolutionaries of Qaddafi’s vast weapons arsenals and the proliferation of these weapons across the region, starting with Mali. There, separatists and Islamist radicals close to al-Qaeda managed to take over the northern part of the country to establish a stronghold.

This fear is quite pronounced with regard to Syria, where Bashar al-Assad’s opponents include jihadi elements, some with links to al-Qaeda, and where the danger of a sectarian war between Sunni and Shia, Arabs and Kurds, Muslims and Christians is very real. Assad’s arsenals, moreover, contain missiles and chemical weapons that could find their way out of the country and fuel conflicts elsewhere, this time—unlike in Libya—much closer to Russia’s borders. After all, the distance from Damascus to Makhachkala, in Russia’s Republic of Dagestan, is less than 1,000 miles.

It needs to be remembered that ordinary Russians recently witnessed large-scale violence much closer to home than ordinary Americans or even Europeans. For almost a decade at the turn of the present century, Chechnya was a bleeding wound, with the Russian army using a lot of firepower to crush the rebels. Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, had to be rebuilt almost from scratch. Even today, the North Caucasus—from Dagestan in the east to Kabardino-Balkaria in the west—remains restless, even though Chechnya itself, counterintuitively, has become a bulwark of relative stability in the region.

In the Russian government’s initial calculus, Assad was likely to hold on to power for quite some time—and this has proven to be a more accurate assessment than repeated Western predictions of Assad’s days being “numbered.” The Russians also believed that Assad’s eventual overthrow would not mean the end of the civil war but only the beginning of its next phase. In President Putin’s words, the Syrian government and the opposition in this case would just switch places, but the fighting would continue. Having such a cauldron of large-scale violence only a few hundred miles from Russia’s own troubled North Caucasus is not good news to Moscow, especially with the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi just a year away.

Broadly speaking, the Arab Spring has already reverberated across the former Soviet Union. There have been no serious attempts to date to unseat the rulers of ex-Soviet republics, but many of the problems those countries faced were not dissimilar from those of the Arab world. When Russia’s urban middle classes, angered by the flawed parliamentary elections of December 2011, staged mass protests in Moscow, some of Vladimir Putin’s would-be detractors at home and abroad hoped that a “Russian Spring” would lead to a meltdown of what they called Putin’s Russia.⁶

The Kremlin rulers themselves were wary not so much of the “huddled masses” of Russia who would rise up against them as they were of Western meddling, whether in the form of encouraging revolution within countries or intervening from the outside. Putin publicly accused Russian protesters of being on the payroll of the U.S. government. To some of Putin’s close aides, like former deputy prime minister and current head of Russia’s state oil company Rosneft, Igor Sechin, the Arab Spring was but the newest form of Western-inspired, Western-led regime change.⁷

Against this backdrop, after Putin’s formal return to the Kremlin in May 2012, the Syrian crisis became a crucible for a new iteration of Moscow’s foreign policy.

Russia’s Material Interests

Russia’s material interests in Syria itself are relatively modest and are only placed at level three. Damascus stopped being Moscow’s ally two decades ago, when Russia withdrew from geopolitical competition in the region. Bashar al-Assad, like his father, continues to buy Russian arms, but he does so as a commercial client rather than as a strategic partner. The relationship is not particularly lucrative given the terms of the debt-repayment deal.

The Tartus facility is useful for the Russian Navy, especially as it is the only such asset anywhere outside the former USSR. With a personnel of about 50, it is a far cry, of course, from being a naval base. Still, the Syrian crisis has become an occasion for the Russian Navy to remind others of its existence. Since 2011, Russian naval ships have made several port calls at Tartus. In January 2013, ships from all four Russian fleets assembled in the eastern Mediterranean for their biggest naval exercises since the downfall of the Soviet Union.⁸ The purpose of the exercise was not to evacuate Russian citizens from Syria, as many observers had concluded, but to send the message that the Russian Navy, after a twenty-year break, was back in international waters.

There are also thousands of Russian citizens living in Syria. They are mostly wives of Syrians, many of them military officers, who once studied in the Soviet Union, and of course their children. Only 3,000 of them, however, are properly registered with the Russian consulate in Damascus. About 1,000 of these Russian passport holders have gone to Russia since the beginning of the war in Syria, but the vast majority remain.⁹ With Moscow’s foreign policy now paying more attention—both rhetorically and in practice—to the well-being of Russian citizens abroad, this is certainly an issue that cannot be ignored.

Moscow has been much more cautious with regard to the roughly 200,000 Circassians, whose ancestors went to Syria and other parts of the Middle East in the nineteenth century, fleeing from the Russian conquest of the North Caucasus. In the midst of the Syrian conflict, several thousand of these people, the muhajeers, applied for permission to resettle in the Russian North Caucasus. The Russian government, however, has only allowed a handful of people back, careful not to add to the complex ethno-political situation in the North Caucasus.

The Role of Religion

At level four is the “spiritual” element of Russia’s position on Syria and, more broadly, the Middle East. The conservative version of Russian nationalism, which is becoming the Kremlin’s new mainstream, is closely related to Orthodox Christianity. Religion is being upgraded to be a centerpiece of Russia’s national identity, and its traditional ethics are being adopted as a foundation of Moscow’s foreign policy. The values espoused by the Russian leadership are based, in the words of Sergey Lavrov, on the “thousand-year-old traditions common to the world’s main religions.”¹⁰

Russian leaders, officials, and many ordinary citizens have recently become frequent visitors to the Holy Land, helped by the introduction in 2008 of a visa-free regime between Russia and Israel. The reinvigorated Imperial Orthodox Palestinian Society, founded in 1882 and enjoying the Kremlin’s support, has been able to reclaim or repair property in Jerusalem, Bethlehem (which now even has a Putin Street, just like Grozny), and elsewhere, thus increasing Russia’s presence in the Holy Land. Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, visited Syria in 2011 and traveled to Israel, the Palestinian territories, and Jordan in the following year.

In Syria, as in Egypt and Iraq, Russian officials have publicly expressed concern over the safety and rights of Christian minorities caught in the whirlwind of Islamist resurgence. It is in Russia’s interests, Sergey Lavrov told the Orthodox Palestinian Society, “to do everything to prevent formation of states which are dominated by extremist groups and where any ethnic or religious group is discriminated against.” Lavrov went even further. “The practice used by the descendants of European Christians in the sphere of human rights,” (emphasis added) he said, “increasingly proves that the truth is not there.”¹¹ This quote illustrates the conviction of many in Moscow that present-day Europe has distanced too much from its roots, allowed far too much tolerance, and denied its Christian identity.

In this situation, Vladimir Putin and his ally Patriarch Kirill are seeking to pick up the mantle of defenders of Christian faith, not so much against other religions, which are treated with respect, but from “blasphemers” at home, like the Pussy Riot punk group and the “godless Europeans” next door—yet another striking metamorphosis in Russian history. President Putin, of course, is not exactly Czar Nicholas I, who formally assumed the role of protector of Orthodox Christians in the former Ottoman Empire, but religion certainly factors into the Kremlin’s thinking.

Moscow’s Other Relationships

The Russian position on Syria is also informed by Moscow’s relationships with other players that have interests in the region, including Iran, Israel, and the West.

Moscow views the Syria policies of many regional actors as being driven not so much by those countries’ concerns for the plight of ordinary Syrians as by a common desire to rob Iran of its most important Arab ally—Syria. Moreover, the Alawite regime’s ouster would harm Iran in other ways as well, weakening Lebanon’s Shia militant group Hezbollah, a proxy that both Tehran and Damascus support, as well as other Shia forces in the region that are allied with Iran. For Moscow, that conclusion applies to the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Israel alike. In addition, the United States and its allies stand to gain a stronger position in a future showdown with Iran should the Syrian regime fall. Russian officials publicly suspect that NATO’s deployment of Patriot missile defense batteries on the Turkish-Syrian border is actually aimed at Iran rather than Syria.

Russia recognizes the Iran-Syria nexus but has taken a wholly different perspective on it. Tehran, the Russians believe, should be part of a solution to the Syrian issue. Moscow has been dismayed at the Sunni Saudis’ refusal to discuss Syria with Shia-dominated Iran as well as by the U.S. support for the Saudi position. To Russian Middle East watchers, the United States is not leading from behind on Syria; it is largely following Saudi policy, which is informed by Riyadh’s regional agenda, centered on the Sunni-Shia rivalry.

The Russians have interpreted the fact that Israel joined the anti-Assad camp as influenced by the Netanyahu government’s growing concern over the Iranian nuclear program. Even if they dispute parts of the Israelis’ analysis regarding Iran, the Russians still understand Israel’s position. Ironically, given the history of the Cold War, Russians now show a lot of empathy toward the Jewish state. Israel has become home to over a million of Russians’ former compatriots who continue to speak Russian, and the two states face many of the same challenges (such as terrorism) and enemies (such as jihadis). President Putin visited Israel in June 2012 soon after his inauguration, and on the nature of the Arab Spring, most Russians and Israelis agree that it is a fundamentally Islamist, not democratic, awakening.

Moscow’s views on the Syria policies of different Arab countries vary. Moscow has welcomed Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi’s effort to bring Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey into the Syrian settlement process. Yet, since 2003, the broader movement to which Morsi belongs, the Muslim Brotherhood, has been on Moscow’s list of terrorist organizations as a result of its activities in the North Caucasus during the Chechen war.¹² It was during that long war that Moscow came to see the Arab world as containing some of the hotbeds of Islamist radicalism that posed a threat to Russia and its near neighborhood in Central Asia and the South Caucasus.

Moscow sees the Islamist regimes now in power in Egypt and Tunisia, as well as the revolutionaries in Libya, as ideological supporters of the Syrian opposition, and it sees the conservative Gulf monarchies as the opposition’s geopolitical and sectarian allies. From the Russian perspective, exporting Islamist radicalism to various countries has long been a survival strategy for the Saudi and Qatari regimes. The Russians are hardly amused by the surge in anti-Russian sentiments and the loss of residual influence in much of the Arab world, but they have not been impressed enough to change course in Syria.