Putin’s Middle Eastern house of cards

The Kremlin’s involvement in Syria’s civil war was always, first and foremost, about posing as a great multi-regional power rather than actually being one. Vladimir Putin’s deployment of a single squadron of warplanes to Hmemim airbase in Syria in 2015 brought a gun to a knife-fight. The Assad regime had been fighting insurgents with poison gas and infamous ‘barrel bombs’ rolled out of helicopters. Russian Su-24 and Su-35 fighter-bombers and Kamov helicopter gunships were quickly able to turn the tide against the growing rebellion and undoubtedly saved Bashir al-Assad’s regime. Unlike America’s multi-trillion dollar investment in Iraq and Afghanistan, Putin was able to change the fate of a nation by sending just 30 aircraft and deploying just 2,300 personnel on the ground – plus a few hundred Wagner mercenaries. 

Putin’s intervention in 2015 allowed him to play the Middle Eastern power broker, just as his Soviet predecessors had done – except without the expense and effort of spending billions of rubles on military aid, building dams, universities and schools as the USSR had done for decades across the region.