By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Putin Chose Ukraine Over Syria

In 2015, when Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Syria at the request of dictator Bashar al-Assad, he had several goals in mind. He wanted to help Russia escape the international isolation it endured following its annexation of Crimea in 2014. He sought to return Russia to a position of influence in the Middle East, where its presence had waned after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He wanted to establish Russia as a global power capable of supporting its allies and halting efforts to topple friendly governments. The intervention in Syria also allowed Russia to assume the role of protector of Christians in the Middle East—a role that, in Putin’s view, decadent Western powers had abdicated, and a mission that fits neatly with Putin’s desire to present Russia as Europe’s last bastion of Christian values.

In the wake of the rapid collapse of the Assad regime, Putin has little to show for this triple agenda. Russia faces the loss of its military bases in the Middle East and showed little concern for the Syrian Christians it claimed to protect as Assad’s secular government was toppled by the Islamist organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. And Russia’s isolation from the international community has only intensified since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

At the core of Russia’s intervention was a message to smaller countries not tightly aligned with Western powers: align with us, and we will shield you from Western-backed regime changes. For nearly a decade, that message seemed credible. Now, however, things look different. Putin’s single-minded focus on achieving total victory over Ukraine has consigned Russia’s other foreign policy objectives to secondary status and cost it one of its greatest foreign policy successes. Assad’s fall invalidates Russia’s claim to be a guarantor of regime stability for allied governments. As long as the war in Ukraine continues, it will remain unable to export security abroad.

 

Highly Requested Presence

From the beginning, Russia’s involvement in Syria was linked to Ukraine. Moscow perceived the Arab Spring in the 2010s as extensions of the Maidan protests in Kyiv and the “color revolutions” that had rocked post-Soviet countries a decade earlier—all of which Putin saw as possible rehearsals for an eventual bid to topple his regime. Outwardly, of course, Putin framed Russia’s intervention in Syria as a counterterrorism operation. Although the West rejected Russia’s overture of partnership against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) in Syria, it accepted the reality of Russia’s involvement in the war against a common—or at least overlapping—enemy. The United States, Turkey, and several Gulf states established military communication channels with Russia, which ceased to be discussed solely as an international pariah, as it had after it annexed Crimea.

Meanwhile, to support the Assad regime, Russia deepened its relationship with Iran, establishing a joint military commission, delivering S-300 missiles to Tehran despite U.S. objections, and working to bypass international sanctions. Putin also did not shy away from arguments with Turkey over its support for Syrian rebel forces, going so far as to levy trade sanctions against Ankara. Nevertheless, its military intervention never escalated into the conflict with regional Sunni states that Putin’s critics had predicted. Although the Russian-Turkish relationship vacillated between hostility and friendship (Putin supported Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during an attempted coup in 2016), Gulf states respected Moscow’s display of military might in a troublesome conflict that had previously proven difficult to manage. Assad was reinstated in the Arab League, high-level contacts between Russia and Gulf countries became more frequent, trade between Russia and the United Arab Emirates increased, and Saudi Arabia and Russia began coordinating on oil policy.

This warm reception extended beyond the Middle East. Countries in Africa, Central Asia, and, to a lesser extent, Latin America found Moscow’s ability to defend an allied regime from domestic turbulence and toppling reassuring. Russia had previously had trouble marketing itself as a convincing investor or exporter of technology, outside of building nuclear plants, and supplying arms. But its successful defense of Assad allowed the Kremlin to sell itself as an exporter of security, both officially through the Russian armed forces, 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, as the Russian Armed Forces operated primarily in the air.

The pitch was effective: African governments, including regimes in Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Chad, Libya, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, and South Sudan, and secular post-Soviet regimes in Central Asia such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan have made use of the offer of Russian troops and mercenaries in their struggles against armed guerrillas and Islamist and separatist groups, as well as for training local armed forces and protection services. For the Central Asian governments, Russia has long been seen as a protector against internal unrest caused by Islamists and Western-backed political opposition, and the Syrian intervention strengthened this perception.

By preventing the overthrow of Assad and returning to Assad’s control most of the territory Syria had lost to rebels, Russia demonstrated that it could influence and even reverse the course of events in the region. At the same time, Gulf countries were offered investment projects in Russia and given diplomatic support from the Kremlin. In 2018, the United Arab Emirates signed a strategic partnership agreement with Russia, and by 2021, it had become Russia’s closest partner in the Middle East, with trade turnover between the two countries rising to $9 billion in 2022. Qatari investment in Russia has reached $13 billion. Previously chilly relationships between the Soviet Union and Gulf monarchies, attributable to Soviet support for revolutionary groups and governments in the region, as well as post-Soviet tensions caused by Russia’s war in Chechnya, hydrocarbon market competition, and Putin’s closer ties with Iran, gave way to rapprochement. The Syrian intervention was the catalyst for a durable new Russian role in the Middle East.

 

Unable to Deliver

Russia’s abandonment of the Assad regime to marshal more resources for the fight against Ukraine vividly illustrates that Putin is ready to sacrifice everything for total victory in the war. Although Putin tries to portray himself as a realist, he has become consumed with Ukraine, to the exclusion of almost all other foreign policy imperatives.

In much of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, Russia had managed to sell its war in Ukraine as a fight for a shared cause: a less Western-centric world order, greater independence in and decentralization of the financial system, and the ability to disregard Western criticism of human rights violations and antidemocratic governances perceived by some non-Western countries as hypocritical. Many countries, including China, India, Vietnam, and the ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia, saw opportunities in Russia’s isolation from the West. When Western firms and investors closed up shop in Russia, non-Western players entered the Russian market and helped Russia to circumvent sanctions. The fall of Assad will not have an immediate effect on the attempts by these businesses and governments to profit from Russia’s isolation. But the spectacle of a Russian ally’s rapid collapse may change their willingness to align with Russia at the expense of relations with the West.

Russia’s ability to provide military force to its allies meant its security services were in demand in both the Middle East and Africa, but the fall of Assad is likely to dent that demand. Russia’s military bases in Syria, to which it may lose access, enabled it to refuel ships and planes and supply troops to both regions. Without a physical presence in the Middle East, that would be much harder. The rebels’ success in Syria also shows the limitations of Russia’s security and economic offerings to allies all over the world. Moscow was successful in helping Assad regain military and political control over most of the country but proved unable to deal a decisive blow to the resistance in the long run.

Russia also failed to promote economic development in Syria or to replace the Western investment that flooded into the country in the early years of Assad’s rule before drying up during the Arab Spring. Syria never escaped the economic black hole into which it fell during the civil war when per capita GDP decreased two- to threefold. In areas controlled by Islamist rebels backed by Turkey, living standards eventually surpassed those in the regions ruled by Damascus backed by Russia and Iran. In rebel-run Idlib, there was electricity, fuel, water, and far fewer food shortages. Russia’s total trade with Syria never exceeded $700 million a year, less than Turkey’s trade with the relatively tiny pockets of rebel-held territory.

 

Monomania

Russia will ultimately weather the fall of Assad and the possible loss of its military bases in the Mediterranean. Russians have always viewed 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. Russians were content with a small, high-tech, primarily air war conducted with limited forces on the ground. Coverage of the Syrian intervention helped shape expectations for the “special military operation” in Ukraine as a swift victory somewhere far away, a quick source of pride that required few societal sacrifices or the involvement of nonprofessional soldiers. When the invasion was not an immediate success, the distant successes in Syria became an unpleasant contrast to the grim reality of the war in Ukraine. As the war enters its third year, Putin has lost yet another Syrian success: his citizens’ confidence in Russia’s ability to swiftly win wars through technological superiority.

Russia, Iran, and many other countries criticize U.S. military interventions as arrogant, ignorant of local context, and unable to fashion either stable regimes or effective security structures. Russia, with its role as a counterweight to Western-backed regimes in the Middle East, and Iran, a regional heavyweight, might have been expected to understand local dynamics. But they failed to foster economic growth in Syria and attract others to Assad’s cause. Investors from Gulf countries, India, and China did not flock to Syria under Russian and Iranian security guarantees. Now, as Russia turns to Erdogan for help in evacuating its military and civilian personnel from Syria, it finds itself in the very role in which it once portrayed the United States as playing: a country distant from the region’s affairs and dynamics, pushed out by local political players uninterested in the presence of outsiders.

Russia’s focus on the war in Ukraine will help Putin, and Russians more broadly, ignore inconvenient questions about Syria, such as what happened to the money and resources Russia put into the country, or why the Russian security services, which now effectively run the country, have been repeatedly caught off guard: by Ukraine's readiness to resist, by Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny in June 2023, by this fall’s Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk region, and now the rapid fall of the Assad regime. Russia’s partners elsewhere, however, will ask these questions. It has become clear that Russia is incapable of providing its allies with military support and economic development as it wages war, and regimes that previously turned to Russia for support will take notice. Russia is now promoting the narrative that it saved Assad’s life and freedom, thus fulfilling its guarantee by sparing him the fate of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. But Moscow’s allies clearly expect much more from an exporter of regime stability and security.

Rulers who hope for Russia’s help may be unpleasantly surprised by how quickly it seeks to establish contacts with Syria’s new leaders. Even before Assad's departure, Russian television stopped calling Hayat Tahrir al-Sham a terrorist organization. More recently, the head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, clearly with Kremlin approval, has proposed removing the “terrorist” label from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the government has allowed the Syrian embassy in Moscow to raise the rebel flag. Now, Moscow is establishing direct contact with the new Syrian government, trying to win its favor by emphasizing that, despite previous attempts to prop up a secular leader against religious fundamentalists, it sees itself as a global bastion of religious conservatism.

Putin has tried to present Russia’s failure in Syria as a victory, claiming that Russia had prevented the creation of a “terrorist enclave” in the country. But Assad’s fall (and Russia’s indifference to the collapse of his regime) suggests that concern for Syria or any other client state has been subjugated by Putin to his overriding focus on dealing Ukraine a decisive defeat. At the same time, Putin’s decision to prioritize Ukraine should not be confused with a complete abandonment of Russian ambitions outside its immediate neighborhood. Rather, the loss of Syria has simply raised the stakes of the war in Ukraine. In Putin’s schema, Ukraine has become a tipping point in a global struggle between the Western elite and a new, Russian-led order: once Ukraine falls, Russia hopes to take Georgia and whatever other territory it desires, and to once again sell itself as a strong patron to countries around the world. In the meantime, however, Moscow’s promises will ring hollow.

 

For updates click hompage here