A viewer of Russian television this week could be forgiven for thinking that the end of the world was imminent, and that it would arrive in the form of grand superpower war with the United States, culminating in a suicidal exchange of nuclear weapons. On one day alone, three separate test firings of intercontinental ballistic missiles were broadcast on state media: two by submarine, one from a launch pad in the Far East.
Last weekend, NTV, a channel under effective state control, aired a segment on emergency preparedness that included a tour of a Cold War-era bomb shelter, fortified in case of atomic war, and a mention of the municipal loudspeakers that will sound upon the arrival of “Hour X.” On Sunday, Dmitry Kiselev, the most bombastic and colorful of Kremlin propagandists, warned on his weekly newsmagazine show that “impudent behavior” toward Russia may have “nuclear” consequences.
Grievances against the West and predictions of militaristic doom are not new in Russia—they have run through all sixteen years of Vladimir Putin’s rule. But they took on a heightened intensity in early 2014, after Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and the U.S. sanctions that followed. Suddenly the question of war was in the air in Moscow. If nothing else, the spectre of a conflict with Washington served as retroactive justification for the Kremlin’s policies, and a ready-made excuse for why the Russian economy had sunk into recession. At home, Russia’s ostracization was spun as a sign of its righteousness.
The war in Syria, however, was supposed to offer Russia a chance to rehabilitate its image and re-start relations with the United States. Last year, Putin travelled to New York, where he addressed the United Nations and called for “a genuinely broad international coalition” to fight the Islamic State. According to a deeply informed new book on Putin and his court, “All the Kremlin’s Men,” by the Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar, the idea, as Putin and his speechwriters had imagined it, was to “brand ISIS as the new Third Reich.” Putin envisioned a grand coalition, Zygar writes—just like in the good old days of the Second World War—that would bring Russia out of its isolation; what’s more, Putin seemed to hope that, by “defeating Islamic terrorism, the Russians and Americans would finally succeed in creating a new world order.”
It would be Yalta, 1945, all over again—Putin’s dream scenario of how global diplomacy is meant to work.
For a while, things appeared to be going largely Putin’s way. At last year’s U.N. general assembly, Putin also had a one-on-one meeting with Obama for the first time in two years. In the months that followed, Moscow became a hub of diplomatic activity, with everyone from Benjamin Netanyahu to the Emir of Qatar flocking to town for audiences with the Russian leader.
Meanwhile, a Russian air campaign in Syria was helping Bashar al-Assad regain territory and push back rebel forces. “Russia’s battlefield successes in Syria have given Moscow . . . new leverage in decisions about the future of the Middle East,” the Times reported as recently as this August. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov were meeting every few weeks, and regularly exchanging gifts and jokes. (In March, when Lavrov turned sixty-six, Kerry told him, “You look terrific for thirty-nine.”)
In September, their talks culminated in a deal—viewed with great skepticism by the Pentagon—that laid out terms for a ceasefire in Syria, and which foresaw joint U.S.-Russian air strikes against extremist groups. Kerry hailed the agreement as “a turning point, a moment of change.”
All that has collapsed in the past month. The ceasefire agreement fell apart after U.S. forces killed dozens of Syrian troops in a bombing raid—a mistaken strike, U.S. officials said—and a U.N. humanitarian-aid convoy was hit in an air attack outside Aleppo, leaving twenty people dead. That strike was widely blamed on Syrian attack helicopters working under the cover of Russian airpower.
In the aftermath of the convoy strike, Kerry declared his interest in seeing Russia and the Syrian government investigated for war crimes for its alleged bombing of civilian areas in Aleppo. The notion that Washington and Moscow could work together to resolve Syria’s horrific war now appears to have been scrapped.
At a press conference on September 28th, John Kirby, a State Department spokesperson, warned that Russia’s continued military campaign in Syria could lead to terror attacks in Russian cities and “troops in body bags.”
Writing in the Financial Times, Dmitri Trenin, the head of Carnegie Moscow Center, a policy think tank, imagined that Syria “could easily turn into a battlefield” between Moscow and Washington, “with the proxies first taking aim at the principals, and the principals then shooting back not at the proxies, but at each other.”
Continued....
Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
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