A RISKY OPERATION

It has long been clear that everything will come down to Syria. This was directly and indirectly spoken about when the Arab Spring was only beginning to blossom, and later, when the conflict in Ukraine entered its hot phase. However, towards the middle of this year the events started to unfold with kaleidoscopic speed: the fall in oil prices felt by many countries, an unexpectedly rapid settlement of the crisis caused by the Iranian nuclear programme, tangible chilling in the US-Israeli relations, developments in Yemen, reports that Bashar al-Assad's troops were about to surrender, Barack Obama's authorization to use US military aircraft to protect the Syrian opposition from both the Islamic State (IS) and the government troops, and finally a massive flow of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa to Europe...

Since 30 September, aircraft of the aerospace forces (ASF) of the Russian Federation have been conducting an operation against the IS terrorist group in Syria - the airstrikes are carried out on military hardware and equipment, the militants' command control posts in the mountains, communication centres, vehicles, as well as arms, munitions and fuel stores of the extremist organization. The military operation began just a few hours after the Federation Council of the Russian Federation had permitted President Putin to use Russian armed forces abroad. The reason for the operation was a formal appeal of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Kremlin assures that land operations are out of the question and that solely the air force will be used and, as far as the personnel are concerned, only officers and volunteers from among contract servicemen.

How it all began

The Kremlin negotiated with Arab countries, Turkey and Israel throughout last summer. In early August, in Qatar, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov presented to his colleagues from the Gulf states and US Secretary of State John Kerry the idea of an international coalition against the IS - that very idea which was announced by Vladimir Putin from the UN rostrum on 28 September, and which Washington clearly could not accept. Moscow knew it. But eventually, the transfer of Russian arms to Syria was no longer possible to hide, and rumours about it began to leak ever more insistently to the media in late August and early September. A month ago, Russia's main foreign mouthpiece, the Russia Today TV channel, quoted a source in the Russian Defence Ministry as saying that "the issue of participation of the Russian military in the fight against the IS has not even been raised". That is, until Putin mounted the rostrum of the UN General Assembly.

Evidently, the Syrian issue was discussed during discreet diplomatic talks invisible to the media, at the level of foreign affairs ministries and military departments of a number of states, but it was the General Assembly that was chosen as a venue for presenting one's arguments to the world. While usually it is rather ceremonial and declarative in nature, this time the session of the United Nations was at the centre of attention all over the world. Russia was preparing for it especially carefully, fuelling interest in Putin's speech in advance. A few days before his address in New York, in which Putin presented his vision of the situation in the Muslim Middle East, he had taken care to show himself as a friend of Islam - namely, he opened one of Europe's largest mosques in Moscow after its restoration. The opening ceremony was attended by spiritual and political leaders of the Muslim world.

Observers have concurred that a verbal duel between Putin and Obama at the General Assembly was one of the most spectacular moments witnessed by the walls of the United Nations. Reporters relished what was happening, thoroughly analyzing the behaviour and facial expressions of the presidents. The situation was agitated by the fact that, as noted by the Politico website, Putin and Obama are not just geo-political rivals; they are people who cannot stand each other on a personal level. Ban Ki-moon apparently got it wrong, too, when he seated Putin and Obama on either side of himself at a dinner for the heads of the delegations and then moved away to give a toast. However, we must not forget that this is just a show. A true discussion took place later, during the US-Russia meeting behind closed doors.

Essentially, it boils down to the following: both sides agree on the need to resolve the crisis in Syria, but they have different views on how the crisis was stirred up and in what ways it can be solved. The Russians ask the Americans: are you trying to defeat the IS or Assad? The Americans ask the Russians: are you trying to defeat the IS or save Assad? What is most interesting, both sides are referring to international law. Obama said that Assad is a dictator who violated the fundamental rights of his citizens, and therefore he should not be saved. In turn, Moscow reasons that Russia's participation in the operation in Syria "is based on international law, in accordance with the official request of the president of the Syrian Arab Republic (SAR)", who still remains a legitimate ruler. Meanwhile, the US-led coalition against the IS is sanctioned by neither the government of Syria nor the UN Security Council. The Kremlin also maintains that it is not driven by ambition or foreign policy objectives, but exclusively by its national interests. From this point of view, the operation in Syria is justified by the concern about the increasing number of citizens of the Russian Federation and CIS countries who joined the IS, as well as by a possible threat from Central Asia. By the way, in addition to the IS, the Taliban that is still in existence has increased its activity in Afghanistan recently. Thus, it is more advantageous for Russia to deal with all the threats as far away from its borders as possible. It is hard to argue with this consideration, and the operation began.

The question is, were Washington and Moscow really negotiating in New York or were they simply notifying each other of their actions, knowing that their clash in the skies over the Middle Eastern country can turn into hell for the rest of the world? "I believe President Obama has heard what President Putin had to say," Lavrov noted after the meeting. No doubt, Putin has also heard what Obama wanted to tell him. This assumption is supported by the fact that the Pentagon and Russia's Defence Ministry have established a direct communication line to avoid conflicts between the Russian military and the US-led international coalition. Furthermore, an information centre has been set up in Baghdad to coordinate the fight against the Islamic State, with the participation of military experts from Russia, Syria, Iraq and Iran, which could not have possibly happened without the approval of the Americans.

Another Afghanistan?

It is noteworthy that a few hours after Russia commenced its airstrikes, US Secretary of State John Kerry all of a sudden stated, during his interview with CNN, that the United States was not against a "smooth transition" of power in Syria and would not call for the immediate resignation of Bashar al-Assad. This was an unexpected change in Washington's rhetoric. Kerry also called Russia's involvement in the resolution of the Syrian conflict a possible "opportunity" for the United States. Given these transformations, there is a popular view shared by many American and Russian experts that Russia, in fact, is not showing its strength in Syria but rather has been caught in the net spread by the United States: it got involved in a military conflict that is far from its borders, against the backdrop of falling oil prices and sanctions, and Syria can thus become another Afghanistan for the Kremlin. Americans speak about their strategy with an air of triumph: we wanted to get away from the region, we were looking for ways not to send troops there, and we found them. Now Russia will pull our chestnuts from the fire, and then we shall see.

But the conflict in Syria is not merely a civil conflict; it is not just a traditional conflict between the authorities and the opposition there. There is a third force in the country, which is recognized as the enemy of all other sides and which is the cause of all the fuss. From this it follows that the United States either deliberately created a threat to which Russia was forced to respond or skilfully took advantage of the existing threat. Speaking from the UN rostrum, Putin said, consciously or not, that it is dangerous to consider terrorists primitive fools, and it is not yet clear who uses whom. Indeed, there are too many unknowns in the Syrian equation. At a closer look, it turns out that everybody benefits from the existence of the Islamic State. Through the agency of the IS, the United States has got what it really likes (or what it is said to like) - controlled chaos. This is the way the US used to achieve its goals and managed to lure Russia into a trap. On the other hand, thanks to the IS, Russia has got the opportunity to legitimately get into Syria and, pretending that it was going to rescue Assad, Syria and the entire Middle East from the terrorists, create a fortified beachhead on the Mediterranean Sea thereby saving its only overseas base and ensuring that the Russian navy will not be locked up in the Black Sea. Not to mention the fact that the loss of Assad's Syria may allow Qatar to build a direct gas pipeline through the Syrian territory to Turkey or Greece. Qatar is already one of the largest gas suppliers to the EU market, and there is no need to explain what this means for Gazprom. It cannot be ruled out that Moscow raises the stakes in the negotiations with the West over the Ukraine crisis.

Putin is playing risky, but what if the Americans start playing in the same way? If the assumption about the "American trap" is incorrect, then it turns out that the administration of President Obama, who had long been called a "lame duck", was obviously indecisive on Syria. In the meantime, the United States has already entered the election campaign, and there are many politicians among the main hopefuls who would in the present circumstances have acted much more decisively than Barack Obama. Nevertheless, speaking in New York, Obama stressed that the US would not hesitate in protecting its friends, if need be. Alarm bells sounded after the first Russian airstrikes when Wall Street Journal and a number of other media wrote, citing US officials including those in the Pentagon, that Russian aircraft bombed not only IS positions but also the territory controlled by the rebels including those trained by CIA instructors. The United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia collectively "expressed serious concern" with regard to Russia's intervention in the Syrian conflict, especially in connection with the strikes of the Russian ASF on rebel-held areas in the Hama, Homs and Idlib provinces. At the same time, the Russian Federation demanded that the United States should ensure clear skies for air operations and withdraw all US military aircraft. The Americans, of course, would not even think to do such a thing and delivered their own strikes against the IS positions in Aleppo on the same day. Even so, the US and Russia started to coordinate their actions through the above communication line so as not to interfere with each other's strikes against terrorists in Syria. In other words, there is some kind of coordination, but the risk of a conflict still remains - not only in the sky, but also as a result of errors on the ground. Moscow was charged with the deaths of civilians from the very first day, which was called by the Russian Foreign Ministry an "information war". However, there may well be a US instructor or adviser instead of a "civilian"...

Russia will be faced with many challenges in Syria, and the United States may contribute to this situation, should it wish to do so. Thus, John Kerry said, in an interview with CNN on 30 September, that if Moscow continues to support Assad's Alawite government, it is going to have problems with Middle Eastern countries, a majority of which are populated by Sunnis, and it can also become a target for jihadists. On the very next day, The New York Times reported that the Syrian group Jaish al-Islam (Army of Islam) had declared war on Russia. The newspaper notes that Jaish al-Islam is allegedly funded by Saudi Arabia, adding that the fundamentalist opposition to IS was founded in Syria in the autumn of 2013 on Riyadh's initiative, and that its militants are fighting both against the IS and against Assad. Meanwhile, in his speech at the UN General Assembly, permanent representative of Saudi Arabia to the UN Abdullah al-Moualimi demanded that Moscow stop the bombing, believing that Russian aircraft bombed civilians.

Will even powerful airstrikes against the IS be enough to suppress the terrorists? Russian media recall that not so long ago, in his interview with the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram published on the Kremlin's website, Putin shared his view that airstrikes alone could not cope with the threat of terrorism. Now Putin assures that there will be no ground operation in Syria. However, for the fight against the IS to be successful, it is necessary to block the sources of their funding, and for that we need effective actions on the ground. Furthermore, the Islamic State is present not only in Syria but also in Iraq, for example. Once again, everything will depend on the ultimate goals and capabilities of Russia, on whether or not it will have allies, and on how far the United States is willing to go to protect its friends.