On March 25, a fire erupted at a shopping mall movie theater in the Siberian city of Kemerovo, killing more than 60 people — including over 40 children.
World leaders around the globe expressed condolences. But Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko took a different tack: he paid tribute to the victims of Kemerovo and the children who lost their lives in Russia’s war in the Donbas and Syria in one breath, connecting the tragedies.
Three weeks later, after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad carried out yet another chemical attack against his people, leaders of the G7 nations discussed “the concerning pattern of destabilizing Russian behavior” in Ukraine and Syria.
Politicians, commentators and activists — both in Ukraine and abroad — frequently draw parallels between Russian intervention in Ukraine and Syria. Both conflicts have become part of broader international narratives of a resurgent Russia prepared to take a dangerous new role on the global stage.
But the actual similarities between the conflict are hardly straightforward, according to policy experts. The two interventions emerged from Russia’s geopolitical vision, but have evolved into distinct proving grounds for Russia’s military and its “great power” diplomacy. They indicate an evolving, rather than a parallel strategy.
War after war
Russia intervened in Ukraine after the EuroMaidan Revolution ousted Moscow-backed former President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22, 2014. In annexing Crimea and creating a fake insurgency in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas, Russia was taking clear steps to assert its regional interests and defend its role in a country it considered part of its “near abroad.”
Analysts concluded that Moscow was pushing back against what it perceived as European Union and NATO encroachment in its sphere of influence.
Then the Kremlin intervened in Syria in September 2015 to back the embattled Assad. Western diplomats speculated that Russia’s aim in Syria was to change its outcome in Ukraine. They believed that Russia intended to leverage its engagement in Syria into broader bilateral cooperation with the United States and then into concessions in Ukraine.
That speculation hardened for many into a hypothesis. But Russia’s success was limited, said Michael Kofman, a fellow at the Kennan Institute.
“One of Russia’s main political failures in Syria was trying to see if it could force a breakthrough with the United States in western Syria, and then translate that breakthrough into addressing major concerns in the European theater, over sanctions and over Ukraine.”
Such a plan would have been a hard sell with the Western leaders, who opposed horse trading over the fate of sovereign states.
Still, in Syria, Russia did manage to end its political isolation with the West, says Kofman. The United States was forced to negotiate with it at several crucial moments. But that negotiation never broadened into greater cooperation. The critical reason, says Kofman, was Russia’s inability to manage its allies, Iran and Syria.
Although Russia portrayed itself as a power broker for its coalition — most notably when the United States was seeking to prevent the fall of Aleppo to Assad in the summer of 2016 — it had no control over its allies. In the case of Aleppo, Russia managed to prolong talks with the United States for several months over a possible cease-fire.
In reality, however, it had no power to offer that cease-fire, says Kofman. Aleppo fell and Russia’s hopes for larger cooperation never materialized.
Flawed vision?
The United States and Europe are no closer to negotiating with the Kremlin on Ukraine than they were before Russia entered the fray in Syria. If anything, the poisonings of ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Assad’s chemical attack and U.S. sanctions on Russia have increasingly raised the specter of a “new Cold War.”
But, if negotiations with the West on Ukraine were indeed the goal, was Russia’s failure a miscalculation of its allies, or a larger flaw in the Kremlin’s own geopolitical vision?
Analysts disagree on what exactly Russia’s geopolitical vision is. But most agree that Russia falls short when it comes to understanding the agency and ability of its neighbors. Regional powers like Iran and Syria can’t be controlled as they were decades ago. Ukrainian nationalism is a different force than it was in the 1930s. And Russia — and the United States — are prone to forgetting this.
“Individual states are now powerful enough to have agency of their own,” said Alexander Clarkson, a lecturer at King’s College in London. “Even if you have moments of U.S. and Russian tension, there are now too many actors around. Both positions have weakened too much to determine any crisis between themselves.”
Kofman agreed that Russia’s geopolitical vision tends to disregard the agency of its neighbors. It wants to be a “great power,” he said:
“They want great power exemptions, they want a sphere of influence, buffer states, and a say over the security orientations of their neighbors,” he said.
The trouble? “Syria and Iran weren’t interested in wider Russian ambitions,” he said. The United States and other powers see no reason why they have to negotiate with Russia.
Spoils of war
For all the territory that Ukraine has de facto lost to Russia, the war in the Donbas has actually demonstrated the strength of the Ukrainian state. Pro-Russian separatism failed to take hold. The Ukrainian public has proven much more unified than Moscow expected.
Even the Ukrainian army has stepped up. After its June 2015 victory at Marinka, “Russia had to accept that it lost a client in Ukraine,” Clarkson said. For Moscow, every thing after that would be “damage limitation.”
Russia’s intervention in Syria likely began as an attempt to assert that it would not allow another client to fall like Yanukovych. But the Kremlin now risks a longer entanglement in the Middle East.
Still, both interventions may prove a boon to Russia and its military in other ways.
In both conflicts, Russia has used private military contractors, on-the-ground auxiliaries designed to absorb casualties. Sometimes, the contractors serving in Syria have previously fought in Ukraine.
In this regard, both battlefields have served as a laboratory for experimentation and, potentially, innovation. Russia’s use of disinformation in Ukraine has received significant media attention, but the country has also focused on more conventional approaches.
Greater geopolitical involvement requires these mercenary groups to allow Russia to circumvent international law and to defend its interests around the globe.
“They cannot compete with overwhelming U.S. military power at this stage, but, through these groups, they want to create some form of rapid response units that would be effective at accomplishing smaller goals under significant time pressure,” said Nadiya Kravets, a California-based Ukrainian political scientist.
But if Ukraine was a platform for experimentation, Syria will prove “more formative and influential on the Russian military,” according to Kofman.
In recent paper with the Kennan Institute’s Matthew Rojansky, Kofman outlines how Russia is rotating large contingents of its forces through the theater and allowing its aircraft and warships to fire cruise missiles. The Kremlin is using Syria to give its troops combat experience. Simultaneously, it is also demonstrating its newest military technology in Syria in the hope of driving future arms sales.
“It’s a training pipeline for Russian officers,” Kofman said.
How the Russian military will benefit from this is an open question.
“So far, I think they have been quite good at adapting, understanding and identifying where the gaps are,” Kravets said.
No easy exit
While the Ukrainian and Syrian engagements have allowed Russia extend the reach of its military power, the interventions are far from a slam dunk.
In fact, the Kremlin may be flirting with disaster, says Edward Walker, an emeritus professor of Eurasian geopolitics at the University of California-Berkeley.
There is no easy way to exit the Syrian war, and the Kremlin has destabilized the region. Moreover, a single engagement in which Russian regular servicemen are killed by Israelis, Americans, or U.S. allies could prove seriously destabilizing.
“They’ve gotten themselves into a horrible conflict that won’t produce a stable outcome in the foreseeable future,” Walker said.
The war in the Donbas poses a parallel, and perhaps even more dangerous problem. It is having a “boomerang effect” on Russia, he says. The country now has an impoverished, highly militarized and lawless zone on its western border.
“It’s an albatross around their neck for dealing with the West,” Walker said.
Kofman thinks the Kremlin sees it differently. It may or may not pay a high domestic price for the war. But if the Vladimir Putin regime holds on to power and plays the long game, it calculates that it may well achieve its sphere of influence — especially in Ukraine, he said.
“The Russian general view is that they’re in a good position, medium- to long-term,” Kofman said.
“Ukraine has nowhere to go, and if they can make it such that Ukraine’s not able to effectively integrate with the West, (Kyiv) will return to a multi-vector (foreign) policy and balance its relationship with Russia and the West.”
“They think: this generation hates us, but the next generation will have no choice.”
