Reëxamining Putin’s Military Interventions in the Middle East

In September, 2015, President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian military to intervene on behalf of the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, who was in the fifth year of waging a brutal civil war against domestic opposition and overseas recruits. By then, the Russian government had already provided weapons to the Syrian state, which had become infamous for horrific human-rights violations. But the Russian military effort helped turn the war decisively in Assad’s direction. Last year, the group Airwars estimated that the Russian intervention had killed tens of thousands of civilians; the United Nations has accused Russia of war crimes. The intervention also offers clues to how Putin wants to wield military power abroad, as has been seen in the last several weeks in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.

I recently spoke with my colleague Anand Gopal, a contributing writer at The New Yorker, who has written extensively about the Syrian civil war for the magazine and elsewhere, and is currently at work on a book about the conflict. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed Russian military strategy, why Ukraine has proved more difficult for Russian forces than Syria, and what the Syrian intervention suggests about how Putin sees Russia’s place in the world.

When Putin’s intervention in Syria started, in 2015, what was the state of the Syrian conflict, and what did you initially view as the Russian aims?

Well, at that point, in 2015, the conflict was a stalemate. Really, the two sides had been entrenched. You had Iran and Hezbollah intervene on the side of the Syrian regime, and that had stopped the rebels’ momentum by 2013. From 2013 to 2015, there was more or less a stalemate. So Russia’s intervention, in retrospect, tilted the balance. But at the time that wasn’t clear, because Russia had intervened essentially in what they said was a very limited engagement to stop various jihadi groups from reaching the Syrian coast, where there are minority groups. So that was a stated aim of their intervention, but it very quickly became apparent that they weren’t actually targeting the jihadi groups; they were targeting primarily the democratic opposition.

What else do you now see as their actual goals?

Well, it was clear that their first goal was to shore up the Assad regime, and shoring it up against what they viewed, I think, was the gravest threat to the regime, which wasn’t the jihadists but that democratic opposition. That’s why they directed the vast majority of their firepower against the democratic opposition. Since then, I think the aim was to end the war and then, two, to take advantage of the postwar environment. In particular, they were hoping to secure reconstruction contracts. So one of the things that Russia has wanted is to end the sanctions regime against Syria, and it was hoping to attract Western reconstruction money, which Russian companies would be in a favorable position to capitalize on.

In terms of the way the Russians fought the war, my sense of it is that they were effective fairly quickly in turning the tide of the war. Is that your sense, too? What was the sense on the ground in Syria of the quality of the Russian military operation?

Yeah, it was clear very quickly that it was a game changer. First, it was primarily because of Russia that the regime was able to retake all of Aleppo and then also was able to retake areas in the Damascus countryside that had been opposition strongholds. And they did this primarily through overwhelming air power. So their campaign in Syria was largely an air campaign. We think there were, and still are, thousands of Russian soldiers on the ground, but they weren’t really leading the fight. It was the Syrian regime conscripts that were leading the fight on the ground, but it was Russian air power that really changed the game. And they wielded their air power both in a more technologically sophisticated way than the Syrian regime and in a devastating way, where they were targeting not just rebel positions but markets, hospitals, schools, with, in many cases, huge civilian casualties in their attacks.

Obviously, the war was fought with incredible, awful brutality by some of the jihadi forces, as well as the Syrian regime and the Iranian regime that was helping Syria. And then America entered the conflict and was responsible for a lot of civilian casualties. How did the Syrian regime compare with the different countries waging war there? Was it more brutal?

Well, the Russians had air power, so that distinguished them from jihadi groups. ISIS, of course, was quite brutal, but the other jihadi groups that were anti-ISIS and anti-regime certainly did commit crimes, but I think nothing on the scale that the Syrian regime or the Russians committed. And so the Russian massacres were numerous. They were using cluster munitions. As I said, they were attacking crowded markets. Just to give an example of the type of brutality that the Russians brought to Syria, the United Nations shared a list of hospitals and clinics in Idlib Province with the Syrian government and the Russians basically in the hopes of getting the Russians to avoid accidentally hitting these places. And, instead, the Russians used this list to target these hospitals.

So it was part of the Russian strategy—to attack hospitals. And that was, I think, partly to break the morale of not just the rebel movement but the population. And also, of course, if you are fighting a war against an enemy and you destroy their health centers, then you make it difficult for them to reproduce themselves on the battlefield. So it got to a point where people in Idlib had to put their clinics literally underground. I saw hospitals that were underground because the Russians would target anything that looked like a humanitarian center or a hospital.

What about the Russian non-air presence? You said that there were Russians on the ground and still are. How effective were they, and what exactly were they doing?

So you had a few thousand Russian soldiers. We don’t know the exact number because Moscow doesn’t release them. Some of them are military police, others are working closely with the Syrian regime forces, others are involved in calling in air strikes. Then you also have private military contractors—Russian private military contractors—such as the Wagner Group, which is very closely linked to the Russian state but is, I guess, technically independent. And so they are active in the country. Then you also have militias. These are primarily Syrian militias, but they are funded and controlled by the Russian government. You count all that up, and you’re talking about probably thousands of people under arms, either directly or indirectly by Russia.

How much do you think the success of Russia was connected to its brutality? Was the reason that it was able to be successful partly that it was willing to do these things and had air power? Or was there something else about the Russian intervention that you think made it kind of strategically valuable?

I think it really did come down to air power, and overwhelming air power. They had more than twenty thousand air strikes. This is an overwhelming amount of firepower that’s being brought to bear. And they’re not unique in this. This is the reason the United States was able to defeat ISIS, as well. The U.S. strategy and the Russian strategy are very similar: they are heavily reliant on air power with a small number of troops on the ground. And, in both cases, they were able to turn the tide against their respective enemies. It’s important to say that they were up against irregular forces, untrained forces, guerillas. It’s a very different question if we’re talking about facing a professional army equipped with anti-aircraft weaponry and an air force.