Letter From the Editors

This week’s biggest international news was the overthrow of longtime Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. The regime change delivers a severe reputational blow to Moscow: After all, when Putin sent military forces to intervene in the country’s fierce civil war in 2015, the Kremlin and its sympathetic analysts spent the subsequent years touting the idea that Russia’s troops were defending Syria’s “legitimate leader” against “terrorist” forces, including the infamous ISIS. These views are amply represented in East View’s books War in Syria and Russia and the Middle East.

Thus, it came as a surprise to our editors to read the current position of Ruslan Pukhov, a military expert featured in the latter collection. He writes in a Kommersant opinion piece: “Almost nine years ago, while assessing the initial (and quite significant) successes of the Russian military intervention in Syria, . . . yours truly pointed out the limitations of these results in the long-term military-political sense and wrote that for Russia . . . ‘it is fundamentally necessary to exit this campaign in time.’ As is now obvious, exactly the opposite happened.” Pukhov argues that Russia did not have enough military power to defeat Assad’s opponents, especially since they were backed by “external forces” like the US and Turkey. He concludes grimly that “the demonstrated limitations of Russian military achievements only encouraged Russia’s opponents to try to take revenge by increasing their intervention and wearing down the Russian side. . . . In a few years, this will be repeated in Ukraine.”

If you believe the Ukrainian Security Service, it’s already happening: The agency claimed responsibility for assassinating Gen. Igor Kirillov, head of Russia’s radiation, chemical and biological protection troops, who died in a bomb explosion just four miles from the Kremlin. US-based analyst Olga Lautman also places the blame (or credit) on Kiev: “Ukraine has once again demonstrated the ability to strike deep inside Russian territory – and last year even reportedly managed to set the Russian flag on fire atop the Kremlin. This underscores the growing vulnerability of Russia’s leadership and highlights the increasing weakness of its internal security.”

The motive for the bombing, which also killed Kirillov’s aide Ilya Polikarpov, seems to be simply payback. According to the USS, Kirillov had ordered the use of chemical weapons against Ukraine’s Armed Forces. Novaya gazeta Europe reports the findings of USS investigators that “chemical weapons have been used in over 4,800 cases since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.” But what about Russian law enforcement’s arrest of a young Uzbek man in connection with the fatal explosion? Lautman dismisses this claim as a PR move: “The quick resolution of the case – purportedly solved in under 24 hours – raises skepticism, as it’s unlikely they identified the real perpetrators so swiftly. In short, the FSB’s statements should not be taken too seriously, as they focus more on damage control than accuracy.”

Speaking of damage control, Aleksandr Lukashevich, Russia’s permanent representative to the OSCE, decries the “false, anti-Russian narrative” being perpetuated by the European delegations. He complains in an interview that “it is getting increasingly difficult to get through to our opponents and bring home to them the true motives behind the Russian leadership’s decisions on Ukraine.”

By contrast, one of Russia’s “opponents” who seems more conciliatory is Abu Mohammed al‑Julani, who led the overthrow of Assad. Gennady Petrov reports on the former Syrian rebel’s joint interview with several Arab TV stations: “Interestingly, al‑Julani talked relatively extensively about Russia. In particular, he said that the new authorities did not want to provoke Russia . . . and now [Moscow] has the opportunity to build new relations with a new Syria. In other words, al‑Julani is not counting himself as one of the Kremlin’s enemies, at least not right now.”

We suspect that the Kremlin will not receive the same grace from the future leaders of Ukraine.