The Question of Russia S Military Intervention in Syria

ASRIYYA MODEL UNITED NATIONS 2017

:Topic The Question of Russia’s Military intervention in Syria 1. Introduction: Russia, as a close ally of the Syrian regime under President Bashar al-Assad remains refusing to sanction tougher action against Damascus by using its veto powers on the UN Security Council. Despite the international condemnation of the Syrian regime, Russian President Vladimir Putin has so far displayed no sign that Moscow is preparing to abandon its ally.In May 2013, John Kerry, US secretary of state, and Putin agreed to establish an American- Russia peace conference. In the same month Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said that Russia was completing its delivery of surface- to-air missiles to Syria. However, he emphasized that “Russia is not planning to sell, Russia has sold a long time ago, and is completing supplies of the equipment - which is anti-aircraft systems, according to the already signed contracts”. Lavrov said earlier that Moscow did not plan to sell its advanced S-300 airdefence system to Syria, but left open the possibility that it could ship such systems to Damascus under an existing contract. Moscow has long been accused of propping up Assad and supplying Damascus with military hardware. Russia is said to oppose a draft resolution, which on Wednesday, May 15 2013, the UN General Assembly is about to vote on. The draft resolution includes condemning Syrian authoritites and accepting the opposition Syrian National Coalition as a party to a potential transition. Timeline: From the first airstrikes at the tail end of September to an intensive bombardment of Aleppo in February that prompted tens of thousands of Syrians to flee, Vladimir Putin’s landmark military intervention in Syria, nominally aimed at hurting Islamic State, has helped keep Bashar al-Assad in power, dividing and infuriating the international community. According to activists, it has also claimed the lives of more than 1,700 civilians. Moscow denies all reports of civilian casualties. Here are the key developments of the past months. End of September 2015 Formal permission is granted by Russia’s upper house for airstrikes in Syria. Assad asks Putin for military aid. Russian defence ministry reports first airstrikes – and from the off an ambiguity of strategy is clear. While Moscow says the strikes were against Isis targets, observers disagree, saying they mainly appeared to hit less extreme rebel groups fighting Assad’s regime. Washington accuses Moscow of throwing “gasoline on the fire” of the war.

2-10 October Russia says airstrikes have targeted command and communications centres, weapons depots and training centres used by terrorists. Human Rights Watch calls for Russia to be investigated for possible violations of the laws of war, while allies in the US-led coalition against Isis call on Moscow to cease attacks on Syrian opposition. 21 October Assad thanks Putin for his military support in the Syrian crisis, praising the Russian leader for intervening to fight “terrorism” in one of the most dramatic turning points of the four-and-a-half-year war. 24 November Putin calls Turkey “accomplices of terrorists” and warns of “serious consequences” after a Turkish F-16 jet shot down a Russian warplane, the first time a Nato country and Moscow have been involved in direct fire over the crisis in Syria. Barack Obama says Turkey had a right to defend its territory and airspace. November – December 2015 First reports that Russia has started to deploy ground troops in battle in Syria. Subsequent reports suggest Russia has deployed its most advanced battlefield tank, the T-90. December 2015 Putin warns that Russia is ready to to scale up its military intervention in Syria, less than a day after Moscow signed off on an ambitious UN plan to end the war. January 2016 Backed by intense Russian airstrikes, troops loyal to the Assad regime retake strategic territory near the stronghold of Latakia, scoring a key victory before possible peace talks in Geneva. 13 February Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev says the world is slipping into a “new cold war” after European leaders condemned his country’s airstrikes on Syria and called on Putin to end them as a precursor for peace negotiations. US senator John McCain voices a widespread concern that Putin is seeking to weaponise the refugee crisis “to divide the transatlantic alliance and undermine the European project”.

March 2016 Russian air strikes killed 4,408 people (including 1,733 civilians) between September 2015 and early March 2016, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. 14 March Putin declares that he is withdrawing the majority of Russian troops from Syria, saying the intervention has largely achieved its objective. The news, relayed to Assad personally in a telephone call, followed a meeting in the Kremlin with Putin’s defence and foreign ministers. What are Russia’s strategic intentions in Syria? Putin intervened because he concluded—as did Iraq and Iran, which together with Hezbollah allies were already helping Syria’s army—that Assad’s state was on the verge of collapse. By the fall of 2015, the Islamist resistance—which is the strongest component of the opposition, not moderates and secularists—had made major inroads into Aleppo and Idlib province and had also begun to move into the coastal zone, the homeland of the ruling Alawite minority. Had Assad fallen, Syria, as Putin saw it, would have eventually been ruled by Islamists bent on creating a caliphate. This he was not prepared to let happen. The Syrian war has already attracted thousands of fighters from Russia’s war-torn North Caucasus, so the possibility of a caliphate in Syria had internal ramifications as well for Russia.

Does Russia desire peace negotiations, or is it actively undermining such negotiations by bombing the opposition? Can there be peace while Assad is still present? It’s not true that Assad has no support in Syria. Various Christian minorities (Greeks, Armenians, etc.), urban Sunnis, Druze, and Yazidis have stuck with him—not all of course and certainly not out of love, but because they fear for their future should a caliphate emerge in Syria. Still, these are not the constituencies Assad has to cut a deal with: it’s the hardline Islamists. ISIS won’t cut a deal. Will the other Islamists do so? If so, on what terms? What would make for a good deal in Saudi and Turkish eyes? Maybe a cease-fire will take hold, but that won’t last unless it serves as a segue to a durable settlement. No one, Putin included, knows what the formula for that is. But until a settlement is in place, he may be stuck in Syria, because the regime may not make it on its own. This is not to say that Russia can succeed in Syria. Certainly, there can be no unified Syrian state ruled by Assad; the old days are gone for good. Moscow understands this. Russia’s calculation, as I see it, is that if it can help Assad’s forces push back the rebels and retake lost critical territory (in Aleppo and Idlib province especially), the regime can enter negotiations in a stronger position. But can there be a deal between a fractious resistance—the opposition consists of a multitude of groups—and a regime with a lot of blood on its hands? How does the still-smoldering conflict in Ukraine play into the crisis in Syria? A successful Ukrainian settlement (however one defines it) or even an enduring cease- fire (which would spare many lives) will make it clear that there are parts of the world in which Russia has to be reckoned with if the West wants diplomatic success and stability, as well as to prove that Russia’s permanent isolation is not a viable strategy. That said, anything close to normalization will require peace along Ukraine’s eastern front and a pullback of heavy weapons and some new political arrangement in the Donbass that is acceptable to both Kyiv and Moscow. So far Minsk II is being adhered to in the breach. The much more important requirement for stability in Ukraine—and for that country’s success—is good governance. There are promising signs (it’s not true that there has been zero reform), but also no shortage of worrying ones.

What will it take for a settlement to emerge in Ukraine?

The essence of any settlement will have to align Ukraine’s right to self-determination, a new political order in the Donbass as part of a unified Ukraine, and Russia’s security interests. Those who say that the last of these shouldn’t count because Russia is the aggressor forget that there cannot be stability in Ukraine without taking Russia into account. There is no evidence that the rupture in relations with the West, low oil prices, and the pinch of economic sanctions have caused Moscow to change course in Ukraine. Now one can insist that that will happen eventually. But “eventually” could be a very long time. And it would be foolish, given the realities in Ukraine, to assume things couldn’t get worse in the meantime. They could, and in all manner of ways, some which may be totally unexpected. Taken together, do these conflicts suggest a new geopolitical confrontation, akin to the Cold War, is taking place? I think that Ukraine and Syria, despite the fact that Russia and the West (and various other parties) are involved, are separate. Ukraine’s crisis resulted from the unraveling of the settlement that the EU had brokered between Yanukovych and his political opposition in February 2015. The latter couldn’t sell it to the rank and file on the Maidan. The protestors had had it with Yanukovych and wanted him gone. Once the deal collapsed, Yanukovych’s support disintegrated. There followed the Russian annexation of Crimea and the emergence of the Russian-backed Donbass republics. What happened in Syria was the result of the Arab revolution, something nobody had predicted and that nobody has explained, at least to my satisfaction. There were different outcomes in different places, but it’s fair to say that the authoritarian regimes quashed whatever chances democracy may have had, with the exception of Tunisia. In all, the crises in Ukraine and Syria have created deep mistrust between Russia and the West. That’s not good for Russia, especially given its economic problems, but it’s certainly not good for the West either. What we have is not, despite the fact that this has become a commonplace diagnosis, a new Cold War. There is no global rivalry that is ideological and military in nature. There aren’t two rival alliances, daggers drawn, in Europe. No one seriously thinks that there will be a nuclear war between the United States and Russia. Still, it’s in no one’s interest to allow things to go from bad to worse.