Putin became fixated on Ukraine: How Russia lost the whole world trying to take over four regions

In 2015, when Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops to Syria at the request of dictator Bashar al-Assad, he accomplished several goals. He wanted to help Russia get out of the international isolation it found itself in after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. He wanted to restore Russia's influence in the Middle East, where its presence has weakened since the collapse of the Soviet Union. He wanted to establish Russia as a world power capable of supporting its allies and stopping attempts to overthrow friendly governments. The intervention in Syria also allowed Russia to assume the role of protector of Christians in the Middle East, a role that Putin felt had been abdicated by Western powers and a mission that was perfectly in line with Putin's desire to present Russia as the last bastion of Christian values in the Middle East. Europe.

After the rapid collapse of the Assad regime, Putin has almost nothing to show for this triple agenda. Russia is at risk of losing military bases in the Middle East and showed little concern for the Syrian Christians it claimed to protect when the secular Assad government was ousted by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. And Russia's isolation from the international community only intensified after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

At the heart of Russia's intervention was a message to small countries with no close ties to Western powers: join us and we will protect you from Western-backed regime change. For almost a decade, that message seemed plausible. However, things look different now. Putin, who focused on achieving total victory over Ukraine, sidelined Russia's other foreign policy goals and robbed it of one of its greatest foreign policy successes. The fall of Assad deprives Russia of its right to assume the role of guarantor of regime stability for allied governments. As long as the war continues in Ukraine, it will not be able to export security abroad.

Russia's involvement in Syria has been linked to Ukraine from the very beginning. Moscow saw the "Arab Spring" of the 2010s as a continuation of the Maidan protests in Kiev and the "Color Revolution" that shook the post-Soviet countries a decade earlier, all of which Putin saw as possible rehearsals for the eventual overthrow of his own regime. Outside, of course, Putin presented the Russian intervention in Syria as an anti-terrorist operation. While the West rejected Russia's offer to partner with the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) in Syria, it accepted the reality of Russia's involvement in a war against a common — or at least neighboring — enemy. The United States of America, Turkey and several countries of the Persian Gulf have established channels of military communication with Russia, which has ceased to be discussed exclusively as an international pariah, as was the case after the annexation of Crimea.

Meanwhile, to prop up the Assad regime, Russia has deepened its relations with Iran, creating a joint military commission, supplying Tehran with S-300 missiles despite US objections, and circumventing international sanctions. Putin has also not shied away from disputes with Turkey over its support for Syrian rebels, going so far as to impose trade sanctions on Ankara. However, his military intervention did not turn

into the conflict with regional Sunni states that Putin's critics predicted. While Russian-Turkish relations have oscillated between hostility and friendship (Putin backed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during a 2016 coup attempt), the Gulf states respected Moscow's show of military power in a troubled conflict that had previously proved intractable. Assad was returned to the Arab League, high-level contacts between Russia and the Gulf states became more frequent, trade between Russia and the United Arab Emirates increased, and Saudi Arabia and Russia began to coordinate oil policy.

This warm welcome extended not only to the Middle East. Countries in Africa, Central Asia and, to a lesser extent, Latin America found Moscow's ability to protect the allied regime from internal upheaval and overthrow reassuring. In the past, it has been difficult for Russia to imagine itself as a convincing investor or exporter of technology, other than building nuclear power plants and supplying weapons. But successfully protecting Assad allowed the Kremlin to position itself as a security exporter, both officially through the Russian military and unofficially through mercenaries such as the Wagner paramilitary company, which fought on the ground alongside the Syrian army, Hezbollah and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, while Russian armed forces operated mainly in the air.

Delivery has been effective: African governments, including regimes in Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Chad, Libya, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique and South Sudan, as well as secular post-Soviet regimes in Central Asia such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, have taken advantage is the offer of Russian troops and mercenaries in the fight against armed guerrillas, Islamist and separatist groups, as well as for the training of local armed forces and security services. For Central Asian governments, Russia has long been seen as a bulwark against internal unrest fueled by Islamists and Western political opposition, and the Syrian intervention has reinforced that perception.

By preventing the ouster of Assad and returning most of the territory Syria lost to rebels under Assad's control, Russia has shown that it can influence the course of events in the region, and even reverse it. At the same time, the countries of the Persian Gulf were offered investment projects in Russia and diplomatic support from the Kremlin. In 2018, the United Arab Emirates signed a strategic partnership agreement with Russia, becoming Russia's closest partner in the Middle East by 2021, with trade between the two countries growing to $9 billion in 2022. The volume of Qatari investments in Russia reached 13 billion dollars. Previously frosty relations between the Soviet Union and the Gulf monarchies due to Soviet support for revolutionary groups and governments in the region, as well as post-Soviet tensions caused by Russia's war in Chechnya, competition in the hydrocarbon market and Putin's closer ties with Iran, have given way to rapprochement. The Syrian intervention became the catalyst for Russia's new strong role in the Middle East.

Russia's rejection of the Assad regime in order to attract additional resources to the fight against Ukraine clearly shows that Putin is ready to sacrifice everything for the sake of a complete victory in the war. Although Putin tries to portray himself as a realist, he is preoccupied with Ukraine to the exclusion of almost all other foreign policy imperatives.

In most countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, Russia has managed to present its war in Ukraine as a fight for a common goal: a less Western-oriented world order, greater independence and decentralization of the financial system, and the ability to ignore Western criticism of human rights abuses and anti-democratic governments. , which some non-Western countries consider hypocritical. Many countries, including China, India, Vietnam and former Soviet republics in Central Asia, saw opportunities in Russia's isolation from the West. When Western firms and investors closed their shops in Russia, non-Western players entered the Russian market and helped Russia circumvent the sanctions. The fall of Assad will have no immediate impact on these companies and governments' attempts to capitalize on Russia's isolation. But the sight of the rapid collapse of Russia's ally could change their willingness to cooperate with Russia at the expense of relations with the West.

Russia's ability to provide military support to its allies means its security services have been in demand in both the Middle East and Africa, but the fall of Assad is likely to see demand drop. Russian military bases in Syria, which it could lose access to, have allowed it to refuel ships and planes and supply troops in both regions. Without a physical presence in the Middle East, this will be much more difficult to do. The success of the rebels in Syria also shows the limitations of Russia's security and economic offers to allies around the world. Moscow successfully helped Assad regain military and political control over much of the country, but proved unable to deal a decisive blow to the resistance in the long term.

Russia, too, has failed to contribute to Syria's economic development and replace Western investment that poured into the country in the early years of Assad's rule and then dried up during the "Arab Spring." Syria has never been able to emerge from the economic black hole it fell into during the civil war, when GDP per capita fell by two to three times. In areas controlled by Turkish-backed Islamist rebels, living standards eventually surpassed those in regions ruled by Damascus with the support of Russia and Iran. In rebel-held Idlib, there is electricity, fuel, water and far less food shortages. Russia's total trade with Syria has never exceeded $700 million a year—less than Turkey's trade with relatively small swaths of rebel-held territory.

Russia will ultimately survive the fall of Assad and the possible loss of its military bases in the Mediterranean. The Russians always treated the Syrian expedition with caution and indifference; The idea of sending soldiers to a distant Muslim country was never popular and evoked memories of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The Russians settled for a small, high-tech, mostly air war fought with limited forces on the ground. Coverage of the Syrian intervention has helped shape the expectation of a "special military operation" in Ukraine as a quick victory somewhere far away, a quick source of pride that requires no sacrifices on the part of society or the participation of unprofessional soldiers. When the 2022 invasion did not achieve immediate success, the distant successes in Syria contrasted sharply with the grim reality of the war in Ukraine. Now in his third year, Putin has lost another Syrian effect: his citizens' faith in Russia's ability to win wars quickly thanks to technological superiority.

Russia, Iran and many other countries criticize US military interventions as arrogant, ignorant of local conditions and incapable of creating stable regimes or effective security structures. Russia, which acts as a counterweight to Western-backed regimes in the Middle East, and Iran, which is a regional heavyweight, would be expected to understand local dynamics. But they failed to stimulate economic growth in Syria and attract others to Assad's side. Investors from the countries of the Persian Gulf, India and China did not go to Syria under Russian and Iranian security guarantees. Now that Russia is turning to Erdogan for help in evacuating its military and civilian personnel from Syria, it finds itself in the same role it once accused the US of: a country far removed from the affairs and dynamics of the region, pushed aside by local political players uninterested in the presence of foreigners.