Putin bogging down in Syria

By Michael Crowley

Russia’s intervention has failed to gain much on the battlefield, raising hopes that diplomacy will make more progress.

As Secretary of State John Kerry heads to Moscow next week to meet with Vladimir Putin, U.S. and Israeli officials say Putin’s intervention in Syria is showing slower results than the Russian president had hoped, possibly making Putin more willing to cooperate with U.S. efforts to settle Syria’s civil war.
Kerry has sidestepped the issue, declining to answer a reporter who asked during a Paris news conference this week whether he thinks Putin regrets his military intervention there. But speaking privately, administration officials offer a more candid take on the Kremlin’s mood. “The Russians thought they would make a lot more progress on the ground fast,” said one official. “They haven’t made really any… It’s measured by low-digit kilometers at the most.”

Putin had hoped his late September intervention would kick off a decisive three-month offensive producing major territorial gains for the Syrian regime, according to Israeli defense minister Moshe Ya’alon.
“The whole idea of the Russian presence in Syria is to launch an offensive,” Ya’alon told the Brookings Institution’s annual Saban Forum on Friday. “It seems to be a failure.”
Both the U.S. and Israel oppose Putin’s Syria’s intervention and have an incentive to spin it negatively. But some independent experts see trouble signs for the Russian president, including a surprisingly stiff response from Syrian rebel fighters.
“The Syrian regime has had tactical gains, but Russian air strikes have not been a game-changer in terms of allowing the Syrian army to move in” and hold territory, said Chris Kozak, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank that closely tracks the Syrian battlefield.
Kozak added that Russia had achieved its “immediate priority” of blunting rebel momentum and preserving the embattled regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. “The balance has clearly shifted and the rebels are on the defensive,” he said.
Even so, Obama officials increasingly offer a “told-you-so” line towards Putin’s intervention, which caught the White House off guard when it began in late September. At the time, Obama warned that Putin risked getting caught in a quagmire abroad while courting terrorism at home. Since then, a Russian airliner departing from Egypt was downed by a bomb, killing all 224 aboard. In late November, Turkey infuriated Moscow by shooting down a Russian Su-24 bomb
Now Putin confronts a stalemated battlefield and, according to some sources, tensions with his allies on the ground in a Syrian war theater that U.S. officials liken to a concert mosh pit.
Russian planes and cruise missiles began striking Syrian rebel forces in late September to buck up Assad, a longtime Moscow ally. Days later, Assad’s rag-tag army began a ground offensive to reclaim territory from rebels suffering Russian attacks. (Russia has mostly targeted rebel fighters not affiliated with the Islamic State, also known as ISIL, because the former pose a greater near-term threat to regime-held territory.) The Syrians were assisted by some 2,000 Iranian-led fighters, including religious militias and a small number of troops and commanders from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRG.
But that ground offensive has mostly sputtered, thanks to what sources called poor coordination with Syrian and Iranian forces, leaving the battlefield map little changed.
Western sources said there are indications that Iran — which has taken significant casualties including the deaths of several senior IRGC commanders — has withdrawn more than half of its forces in a sign of frustration — and perhaps mounting tension with Moscow over strategy.
Officials said Putin’s own frustration with the battlefield effectiveness of Assad’s forces and their allies on the ground helps explain his willingness to join peace talks that have convened twice in Vienna this fall. Obama and Kerry hope that an agreement among the many countries that are party to the conflict — including Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey — will begin a process that removes Assad from power, something they call a prerequisite to ending the wider Syrian conflict and allowing for the defeat of ISIL.
“The lack of significant military progress by pro-regime forces only emphasizes the failure of Assad’s leadership, which explains why Putin has been so willing to publicly back the idea of Assad’s departure as part of a political settlement,” said one U.S. intelligence official.
Kerry hopes to discuss those topics with Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov when he goes to to Moscow, the latest in a stepped-up pace of meetings between the two countries: Putin and Obama held two informal meetings in November and a formal session at the United Nations in late September. That suggests that an administration debate about whether to isolate or engage the Russian leader diplomatically has tilted decisively toward the latter option.
Kerry will also cajole Russia to join another round of the Syria peace talks the Obama administration wants to convene in New York City on December 18. On Tuesday, Russia’s U.N. envoy said more preparatory work needed to be done before they will agree to such a meeting.
Despite the talk of setbacks for Putin in his Syria campaign, some Russia experts were doubtful that the Russian president is breaking much of a sweat. “He’s got plenty more leash before he runs into the brick wall that a lot of Western observers believe is waiting for him,” said Matthew Rojanksy, director of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, a Washington think tank.
U.S. officials, who have repeatedly been surprised by Putin’s actions in Syria and Ukraine, don’t rule out the possibility that the Russian president may escalate his fight. Speaking to Russian military officials on November 20, Putin hinted at “next phases” in his campaign there, saying they had achieved early objectives but adding, “that is not enough to cleanse Syria of rebels and terrorists and to protect Russians from possible terrorist attacks.”
Rojansky said that if Putin is in a sour mood, it is not over the Syrian battlefield but the Turkish shootdown of his plane, as well as last week’s announcement that NATO is inviting Montenegro to join the alliance. Putin has called NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe a threat to Russia. And on Tuesday, Russia’s former president and current prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, said Turkey’s action amounted to an act of war.
“There will be reactions to both those things,” Rojanksy said. “I can’t tell you what they will be. But they will be serious.”