Russia and Syria: Autocrats Together
NO FOREIGN leader can talk to Vladimir Putin these days without discussing Syria. And the Russian president has met many this month, as he hopped from Paris to Berlin to a Russia-European Union summit in St Petersburg and on to China. European leaders in particular pressed him to take a firmer line against Syria’s president, Bashar Assad. But Mr Putin stuck firmly to his position: both sides are to blame, and any push from the West to unseat Mr Assad risks igniting civil war.
That Russia has been able to place itself at the centre of Syria’s grim drama shows, in one sense, the success of its strategy. The Russians have some special interests in the country—more than 75% of Syria’s weapons are bought from Russia, for example, and it has a naval facility at Tartus. But its policy ever since the uprising began over a year ago has never really been about Syria, but about showing that Russia is an influential and pivotal world power whose voice must be heeded.
The Russians believe that their stubbornness has changed how the world responds to Syria—and that alone is a victory. The peace initiative of Kofi Annan, a former UN secretary-general, is really a product of Russia’s making. In recent months “the world was beating a path to Moscow’s door,” says Carroll Bogert of Human Rights Watch, who met Russian officials this spring. “Their chests were all pumped up.”
The West has looked at Syria through the lens of democracy and human rights, towards which the Russian government is instinctively sceptical, if not actively hostile. The Russians prefer to see it as a proxy struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran as much as a home-grown uprising. And they think both that the Assad regime has shown more restraint than it is given credit for and that the opposition has been less peaceable than is often reported.