Putin Turns to Ukraine Playbook in Syria Russia keeps West guessing as it moves militarily to shore up an ally By James Marson and Nathan Hodge
http://www.wsj.com/articles/putin-turns-to-ukraine-playbook-in-syria-1444252870
MOSCOW—In Syria, Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to take a page from his Ukraine playbook by keeping the West guessing about his plans, employing the military art of deception known in Russia as maskirovka, or camouflage.
Analysis
Last year he surreptitiously sent Russia’s army into Ukraine, reversing the advance of Ukrainian government forces and bringing pro-Russia rebels a more-favorable peace settlement. Now, he’s repeating the gambit in Syria: shoring up his ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and ensuring the Kremlin will have a central role in deciding the country’s future.
Russia stepped up its attack on Mr. Assad’s opponents Wednesday, firing cruise missiles into Syria from warships in the far-off Caspian Sea. At North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters, the U.S. ambassador said Russia had built up a battalion-sized ground force in Syria, one equipped to take on a bigger mission than just defending Russian military bases there.
ENLARGE The Russian military campaign that began one week ago was preceded by denials from the Kremlin. A buildup of combat aircraft in Syria, visible on satellite imagery, was merely the continuation of the delivery of military hardware to the Syrian regime, Kremlin officials said.
That fits with the template set in Ukraine. When well-armed men in green camouflage without unit insignia appeared last year in the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, the Kremlin insisted the men—who were clearly military professionals—were only local self-defense forces. Mr. Putin subsequently acknowledged the “little green men” were Russian troops.
When Western and Ukrainian officials said Russia later sent its army into eastern Ukraine to halt the government’s offensive, Russian officials said they were volunteers. Moscow continues to deny it has sent any troops or materiel into eastern Ukraine.
In Syria, Russia now says that it is carrying out airstrikes against Islamic State and other “terrorist” groups, in coordination with the Assad regime. But the recent buildup raises concern that Russia may be preparing for ground operations—or even expanding into neighboring Iraq.
Asked in an interview late last month with U.S. broadcaster Charlie Rose whether his aim was to rescue Mr. al-Assad’s administration, Mr. Putin replied: “That’s right, that’s how it is.”
Following Wednesday’s naval bombardment, Mr. Putin articulated his preferred end-state even more clearly. The conflict in Syria, he said, required the warring parties to come to the negotiating table.
“Such type of conflicts should conclude with a resolution of political questions,” he said.
It is unclear how, exactly, Russia plans to bring them to the table. Mr. Putin said he supported the idea of trying to combine the efforts of Mr. Assad’s forces and the “healthy opposition” groups against Islamic State—an idea Mr. Putin said had been proposed by French President François Hollande at a meeting in Paris on Friday.
ENLARGE A French government spokeswoman denied Mr. Hollande had backed any such proposal.
U.S. officials say Russia has deliberately targeted so-called moderate rebel groups backed by the Central Intelligence Agency, sparking worries about a broader confrontation between Washington and Moscow.
Russia entered the 4½-year Syrian war as Mr. Assad’s forces were losing territory to a patchwork of opponents. Most of the several dozen airstrikes in the first week of bombing have hit areas where Islamic State isn’t present.
But Russia hasn’t hit with the kind of overwhelming force that would bring total victory to Mr. Assad, much as Russian conventional weaponry last year helped pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine even out their front lines, but not advance on Kiev.
“Moscow wants to ensure that the situation in Syria will be settled on Russian conditions,” said Nikolay Kozhanov, nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center. “Russia wants to shore up the front and undermine the opposition’s capacity to fight. It’s not a priority to take the whole country.”
Russia’s intervention is the first time for decades that it has deployed armed forces far from its borders. It is also waging a kind of warfare it hasn’t tried before: targeted airstrikes and over-the-horizon naval attacks.
Chris Harmer, a retired U.S. naval aviator and former airstrike planner, said videos and information released by the Russian military—including the location of strikes—indicated more about the Kremlin’s military aims.
ENLARGE Russian aircraft, he said, were serving as a “maneuver element” for Mr. Assad’s besieged forces, who are hunkered down in fortified enclaves and depleted by defections and combat losses.
“The Russians are there to push back lines and stabilize Assad’s defense,” he said. “There’s no exit strategy for Russia…As long as Assad is in power now, the Russian air force needs to protect him.”
For now, Russia insists it won’t commit ground troops to the fight. One lawmaker’s suggestion this week that the Kremlin could countenance “volunteers,” a tactic used in Ukraine, was quickly disavowed by the government.
It also maintains that it has no plans to begin military action in Iraq, at least without the kind of formal request from Baghdad that it received from Mr. Assad.
Some analysts say Russia doesn’t have the appetite for a major foreign adventure, reflecting memories of Moscow’s decade-long quagmire in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
A public opinion survey in mid-September by the Levada-Center, a Russian social-research organization, showed only 14% favored of military intervention in Syria.
“The polls reflect fears among ordinary Russians that the war in Syria could be going on and on,” said Vladimir Sotnikov, senior research associate at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Eastern Studies.
Write to James Marson at james.marson@wsj.com and Nathan Hodge at nathan.hodge@wsj.com
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