Russia’s intervention in Syria, launched in September 2015, achieved its primary objective: to prevent a military defeat of the Assad regime, which had been losing ground for several months. The presence of the Russian air force also made it impossible for the US to enforce a no-fly zone over Syrian territory. In 2013 Russian diplomacy had made it more complicated for the West to intervene against the Assad regime by getting the regime to agree to a monitored disposal of Syria’s chemical weapons.

The objectives that President Vladimir Putin put forward in his address to the UN on 28 September 2015 were far more ambitious. They were formulated as a challenge to the US and its western allies, to force them onto the defensive. Putin’s timing was decisive: the influx of Syrian refugees into Europe, and the bombings there organised by ISIS from Syria were at their height.

Putin played on the fact that only the Assad regime and the Kurds were ‘valiantly fighting terrorism’, and that, because he was responding to a request from the Syrian government, his actions fell within the framework of international law, unlike the western airstrikes. He also pointed out that the no-fly zone imposed over Libya, followed by western support of rebel forces, had led not only to the removal of the Gaddafi regime, but to the destruction of the entire state apparatus, creating the conditions that had allowed ISIS to move in. Putin argued that given Syria’s strategic importance, the impact of a military defeat of the Assad regime would be ten times greater than Gaddafi’s. He evoked the grand coalition against the Nazis formed by the USSR, the US and the UK in June 1941, and called for a similar alliance to combat ISIS, which was ‘seeking dominance in the Islamic world’, emphasising that ‘the ranks of radicals are being swelled by the members of the so-called moderate Syrian opposition, supported by western countries.’ Effectively, he was telling the West to choose the (...)