Nicole Grajewski
Rebel forces swept into Aleppo on Saturday, capturing the city center in a lightning three-day offensive that seemed to show the slackening of Moscow’s grip on Syria. The symbolism was impossible to ignore: The Syrian regime’s brutal reconquest of that very city in 2016 had demonstrated Russia’s military effectiveness. Now Vladimir Putin’s Russia is preoccupied with Ukraine, and Aleppo has slipped from regime control.
But Russia’s commitment to Syria has not actually wavered, and Russia is not really distracted. The advance of Syria’s rebels, led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), reflects the degradation not of Russian attention but of the multinational ground forces supporting the regime of Bashar al-Assad. And Russia is not only not contemplating withdrawing from Syria—it looks poised to double down on its investment there, even if it has to rely on Iranian-backed forces and the cooperation of regional powers to do so.
Syria is important to Moscow because intervening there in 2015 allowed Putin to reverse the narrative of Russian decline that had taken hold since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia would no longer be what then-President Barack Obama dismissed as a declining “regional power”—it was to be a decisive great-power patron of the Assad regime, and as such, it would rewrite the playbook of outside intervention in the Middle East. American-led interventions, such as the invasion of Iraq and the NATO campaign in Libya, shattered states and bred chaos. Russia would have the opposite effect, preserving Syrian sovereignty and regional order.
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