Really?
Russia and Turkey announced an agreement Tuesday to jointly patrol almost the entire northeastern Syrian border after the withdrawal of Kurdish fighters, cementing the two countries' power in Syria in the wake of President Donald Trump's abrupt withdrawal of U.S. forces.
Let's move past the false assertions that the move "cements" their power in that part of Syria, rather than putting them in a hornet's nest; and that Trump's long-held desire to get out of the region is an "abrupt" decision.
I want to know why Russia is stretching their forces to virtually the entire Syria-Turkey border east of the Euphrates River.
I've long noted that Russia had little interest in what happens in eastern Syria because all the Russians need to do to keep their air and naval bases is secure western Syria.
Indeed, Russia has an interest in preventing Syrian authority from being restored in the east to block Iran's overland line of supply to the Mediterranean Sea. The last thing Russia wants is to drag Israel into active fighting around Russia's shiny new bases.
Getting involved in that border region just costs Russia money, and possibly casualties. And it will inevitably anger the Turks and the Syrian Kurds who can't possibly both be happy with Russia's actions--as we discovered in dealing with both. And Putin's move will possibly annoy Assad if Assad thinks Russia is enabling a Turkish occupation of more Syrian territory.
This will strain Russia's military capabilities, as one Russian analyst states:
“[There’s a risk] of being pulled into a potentially large-scale ground operation, which we have managed to avoid in the previous four years,” he outlined in his first concern.
“The operation is formally that of peacekeeping and counterterrorism, but in order to implement it, Russia would need to deploy larger forces and more equipment far away from our military bases in Hmeimim and Tartus. This will make the air force support for the troops more difficult,” Murakhovsky explained.
“Objectively speaking, the Russian engagement [in the] ground operation plays [an] American card. The air space east of the Euphrates is [still] the zone of control of the Americans, and we’ll have to deal with this issue,” Murakhovsky said, describing the second concern.
Regarding the third concern, he argued, “Russian troops become a target for radical and terrorist elements of various Syrian National Army factions as well as the Kurds. Russians may fall prey to 'side attacks' on Turkish forces."
Russia's military will have to cash the check that Putin wrote. This could just be the first check cashed if everybody doesn't cooperate:
Russia sent about 300 more military police and more than 20 armored vehicles to Syria on Friday under an accord between Ankara and Moscow that has halted Turkey’s military incursion into northeast Syria.[*]
So to the Russians:
Really, what are the odds of this being a brilliant Putin scheme given the evidence that the Fuck-Up Fairy lives in Russia now?
And this is good news for Ukraine, because broke Russia can't afford too many active fronts. Which means that Syria is effectively Ukraine's forward defense line.
I swear to God that Putin measures his power by how much he can poke the West and get media coverage. He'd rather be feared than liked--or, God forbid, ignored. His escalating intervention in Syria is like some bizarre form of click bait.
UPDATE: In related news, American troops are returning to eastern Syria to help deny eastern oil fields to ISIL, Assad, or Iran:
A convoy of about 18 US military vehicles departed northern Iraq and headed into Syria on Saturday morning, rumbling through Rmeilan town, past Qamishli and toward the interior of the war-torn country.
CNN video shows a group of American armored vehicles and trucks on the road near Rmeilan. Syrian Democratic Forces fighters and a KRG border official confirmed the US military crossing earlier in the day.
As I said early in the imbroglio, a US withdrawal doesn't have to be permanent. So this was rapid. And it is in addition to the Tanf garrison we are maintaining. We aren't so much abandoning the Syrian Kurds as we were avoiding a war with Turkey over the Kurds--which would have been the real blunder.
*And those MPs were taken from Chechnya. If Chechens who don't want to be ruled by Moscow take advantage, Russia could find itself with a revived resistance there.
