Russia Has a Longstanding Interest in Middle East

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In the past few weeks, Russia has expanded its military presence in Syria, sending weapons, tanks, air missile systems and planes to support the Bashar Al-Assad regime.

It is now engaging in bombing runs itself and Russian warships in the Caspian Sea have also fired cruise missiles at Islamic State (ISIS) strongholds.

The old Soviet Union had a long-time relationship with Syria. Their alliance was strengthened during the Suez crisis of 1956, which brought the two countries together in backing Egypt.

The alliance was upgraded and formalized in the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation signed by Hafez al-Assad (Bashar’s father) in Moscow in 1980.

Russia has been Syria’s major arms supplier for decades, accounting now for over three quarters of Syria’s arms purchases.

But Russia has intervened in the complex ethnic and religious brew that is Syria for centuries. They’ve “been there, done that,” before.

Tsarist Russia had a vision of its traditional mission in the Middle East, and so did its Russian Orthodox Church, which considered itself the defender of Orthodox Christianity. It claimed to inherit this role from the Byzantine Empire after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453.

Moscow would now be the Third Rome (after Rome and Constantinople).

In 1768, Catherine the Great went to war with the Ottoman Turks, and the Russian fleet annihilated the Ottoman fleet at Chesma in 1770, after which Russians temporarily dominated the eastern Mediterranean, as they do today. Russian ships bombarded Syrian cities, and also eventually temporarily occupied Beirut.

This battle inspired great confidence in the Russian fleet. The defeat of the Ottomans also sped up rebellions by minority groups in the Ottoman Empire, especially the Orthodox Christian nations in the Balkan peninsula.

Catherine’s successors saw themselves as crusaders, with Russia destined to rule Constantinople and Jerusalem. Fearing Russian expansionism, Britain and France came to the defence of the Ottomans, leading to the Crimean War in the mid-19th century. Russia was defeated but didn’t give up its dream of eventually conquering much of Turkey and the Levant.

During World War I, the Russians, now allied with Britain and France against Germany and the Ottomans, were promised control of Istanbul (the former Constantinople). But the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 put an end to these machinations.

However, President Vladimir Putin is in many ways a throwback to pre-Communist Russian political culture and again sees Moscow as a “world-historical” imperial power. And so he is acting the role the tsars once played in the Middle East.