The Syrian civil war has presented Moscow with two major challenges. First, the collapse of the Assad regime would likely result in a sharp decline of Russian influence in Damascus, as Syrian opposition leaders have warned that, if they come to power, they will punish Russia and other foreign governments that stood by President Bashar al-Assad. A change of government in Damascus would also likely reduce Syrian purchases of Russian arms and, more importantly, limit other economic and security ties with Moscow. This was already Moscow’s experience after the fall of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, where the new government sharply reduced economic ties with Russia.
Second, Russian analysts are worried that an Islamist victory in Syria, even more so than in distant Libya, could set off further sectarian violence in the heart of the Middle East. That, in turn, could encourage Islamist extremism in the North Caucasus and Central Asia. They also fear that even the more moderate Syrian rebels who are receiving military and other assistance from Persian Gulf countries would likely replace the secular Syrian government with a Sunni regime.
For this reason, Russia did not pursue a Saudi offer earlier this year, by which Riyadh would buy billions of dollars of Russian arms and not compete with Russian energy sales to Europe in return for Moscow abandoning Assad, particularly at the U.N. Security Council. In determining its Syrian policy, Moscow clearly places more weight on strategic and status considerations than on economic ones. Furthermore, some Russian leaders probably fear that these Western-backed revolts against the authoritarian governments of the Middle East might encourage similar resistance among Russia’s own population or establish precedents for foreign intervention in Russia’s internal affairs.
Rather than defend Assad directly, however, Russian diplomacy has focused on demanding adherence to international law, generally seen as requiring Security Council authorization for one state to use force against another except in cases of self-defense. Meanwhile, at the Security Council, Russian diplomats have consistently vetoed, or blocked through the threat of veto, any resolutions that would have forced Assad to yield power or that would have imposed sanctions on the Syrian government.
They justify their position by arguing that the question of who should lead Syria should be determined by the Syrian people, without external interference from the international community. Whereas Western governments cite the imperative of protecting civilians from mass violence, especially involving the use of weapons of mass destruction or genocide, Russian diplomacy upholds traditional interpretations of national sovereignty that severely restrict the right of foreign powers or international organizations to intervene in a country’s internal affairs.
Russian officials also profess to see the events in Syria as a civil war between armed factions, including al-Qaida, rather than a popular revolution by an oppressed people against a brutal authoritarian dictator. This interpretation makes efforts at negotiating a compromise settlement much more plausible and legitimate. It also allows Moscow to denounce U.N. resolutions that attack only the Syrian government as being unbalanced and one-sided, and to characterize them as offering encouragement to the regime’s opponents to keep fighting.
From this perspective, if the current Syrian regime collapses, the result is likely to be not a gentle transition to a liberal democracy, but rather a violent conflict between the elements of the winning coalition. In such a struggle, the most ruthless factions, which Moscow claims are Islamist extremists affiliated with al-Qaida, have the best chance at victory. Furthermore, foreign military intervention in Syria would likely draw in other outside powers protecting their local allies and interests, such as Iran defending the Shiites, Turkey countering the Kurds and even France protecting the country’s Christian population.
Russia’s leaders are applying the lesson they learned from their 2011 experience in Libya, which echoed previous examples of Western governments’ willingness to use force—in Kosovo in 1998 and Iraq in 2003—without the explicit approval of the U.N. Security Council. Back in August 2011, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov already declared, "Russia will do everything it can to prevent a Libyan scenario happening in Syria." Russia has stuck to that position ever since.
In the case of Syria, Russian diplomats have sought to establish a clear firebreak excluding any resolution that might be interpreted to mean that the Security Council had authorized action on the ground. The Russian delegation has forced the rewording of resolutions so that they do not call for Assad’s removal, but also so that they apply any measures—such as demands for a cease-fire—equally to the government and its opponents; require the political opposition to distance itself from armed rebels and foreign terrorist groups such as al-Qaida; provide greater opportunities for Arab and other third-party mediation; and explicitly endorse further negotiation efforts.
In their positioning on Syria, Russian policymakers would have preferred not to break with the Arab governments that seek to overturn the Syrian regime. Nevertheless, they might suspect that their steadfast support for Assad could win them quiet kudos from Arab leaders alarmed by the ease with which the West abandoned former Egyptian ruler Hosni Mubarak, former Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and other Arab leaders the West had assiduously cultivated over the years. In addition, the Arab street is divided about how much foreign intervention is optimal in Syria, and there is regional suspicion about Western motives, with many Arabs sharing the Russian perception that Western governments use human rights abuses as a pretext for deposing regimes whose policies they oppose for other reasons.
Ironically, the fact that, with the exception of a brief interlude this summer, Western governments have ruled out military intervention against Syria might have emboldened Russian resistance, since it could be interpreted to mean that Syria is less important to the West than the Libyan civil war was or, for that matter, than the Iranian nuclear program is. In these cases, Russia consented to Western-backed U.N. sanctions since Western governments had refused to exclude the use of force to resolve the issues.
After U.S. President Barack Obama declared that the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons would serve as a “red line” that could trigger U.S. military intervention, Russian diplomats did whatever they could to deny and downplay recurring evidence of Syrian government chemical weapons attacks against the insurgents. When the accumulated evidence became undeniable, Russia pressed the Syrian government to take the unprecedented and surprising step of dismantling its chemical weapons arsenal, which Syria spent billions of dollars developing as a strategic deterrent against Israel.
A more credible Western threat to intervene earlier on in the conflict might have induced Moscow to agree to sanctions or other measures to avert such an intervention. Nevertheless, in many ways preventing the “Libya precedent” from applying to Syria has become Moscow’s own red line, one that Russian policymakers will likely continue to defend through all the diplomatic means at their disposal.
Richard Weitz is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a World Politics Review senior editor. His weekly WPR column, Global Insights, appears every Tuesday.
Photo: Then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Damascus, Syria, May 10, 2010 (photo from the website of the President of the Russian Federation, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license).
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/13417/global-insights-despite-mounting-costs-russia-sticks-by-syria-s-assad
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