Why is Russia Backing the Assad Regime in Syria?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Why have the Russians remained such steadfast supporters of the Syrian regime, supplying Damascus with diplomatic and political aid as well as sophisticated military equipment?

Is it a vestigial ideological attachment, dating back to the days when the Soviet Union backed left-wing Arab states like Iraq and Syria against American Middle East allies, including Israel?

Is it President Vladimir Putin’s desire to demonstrate that Russia has returned to the world stage as a major player, after the country’s weakness and humiliation during the Boris Yeltsin years in the 1990s, when the United States and NATO had a free hand in the Balkans and elsewhere, wresting Kosovo from Russia’s Serbian ally?

Or is it that the Russians prefer a weak Shiite regime that is ostensibly secular to the Sunni militants fighting to remove Bashar al-Assad?

It’s probably a combination of all three.

Lest we forget, the Soviet Union for decades had a very close military and political alliance with Syria, which had declared itself a “socialist” country under the Ba’ath Party. The USSR was Syria’s main arms supplier. In turn, the Russians acquired a Mediterranean naval base at Tartus in 1971.

Indeed, it was Moscow’s erroneous intelligence reports warning that Israel was going to attack Syria that led to the Mideast war in 1967 -- a war in which the defeated Syrians lost the Golan Heights.

In 1972, President Hafez al-Assad (father of the current leader) signed a peace and security pact with the Soviet Union as a means to strengthen its defense capability. During that year, Moscow delivered more than $135 million in Soviet arms to Damascus. In 1980 Assad and Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev signed a further twenty-year treaty of friendship and cooperation.

The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in 1987 assured Assad that the Soviet Union would continue to provide Syria with economic and military aid. These promises were kept when Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father in 2000.

Since the turn of the century, Russia has sold over $1.5 billion worth of weaponry to Syria. And it now appears that Russian MiG-29 fighter jets and S-300 air defence missiles may be headed to Syria. This would make it harder for the U.S. to impose a no-fly zone over Syria. It will also make Israel, which has already bombed Syria recently to stem the flow of Iranian arms to Hezbollah, more vulnerable to Syrian counter-attacks.

Apart from the arms trade, Russia has strong economic ties to Syria. Russian business investment there now stands at nearly $20 billion.

Russia has used its veto on the UN Security Council three times to protect the Assad regime. Moscow has blocked resolutions aimed at condemning Assad or imposing sanctions.

Putin remains disgruntled at the way UN resolutions passed against the Gadhafi regime in 2011 were extended by NATO into bringing about regime change in Libya, and he doesn’t don’t want the same thing to happen with Syria. He wants the west to know that it can’t do an end-run around Moscow.

Putin also worries that Sunni militancy may spread further, into his own country. The Russian Federation includes some 16 million Muslims, and the Russians are already contending with Islamist terrorism in Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia in the Caucasus. There are even militant rumblings in Tatarstan, an important economic and geographic republic on the Volga.

Some of this ideological and religious extremism is being fuelled by Saudi Arabian money – the same country backing the Syrian rebels. So Putin doesn’t want a Sunni takeover of Syria, one that may include elements allied with al-Qaeda. This could inspire renewed violence at home.

As a corollary, Russia is also trying to present itself as the protector of Christians in the Mideast. There are nearly a million in Syria and 52 per cent are Greek Orthodox, as are most ethnic Russians. Syria’s Christians, along with the ruling Alawites, also fear a Sunni takeover of the country and so most support, or are neutral towards, the Assad regime.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will be meeting soon to discuss when and how to get Assad’s government and the rebels to sit down together and talk peace. In the meantime, though, the Russians continue to bolster Assad’s military.

Apart from Russia, Shiite Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon are also providing aid to Damascus. Even Iraq, now governed by a Shiite regime, has some involvement. This war has now entered its third year and no end seems in sight.