oil prices? they're up. which is good for FoV
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Putin and Russia in Syria
- Thread starter Dans
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oil prices? they're up. which is good for FoV
How unimaginative. That was a ground campaign.
In some occasions yes, probably not as much as I'm guessing the Israelis.
Either way, didn't know that using depleted uranium in densely populated areas was a testament to US military efficiency in preventing civilian casualties.
Thought so. When were those used in Syria? How about roof-knocking? The type of measures that let civilians flee unharmed at the cost of the terrorists potentially fleeing as well.
Let's save ourselves some time and agree that the Israelis are quite good at giving a heads up before they bomb their targets.
We are quite good, thanks. It would also save us all our precious time if we stopped blaming the Russians for civilian casualties in Syria without any evidence that they are doing worse than the US in that respect.
Who is blaming them ? I just highlighted the conditions where it may be an issue and cited the reasons why and how they are different than the US.
The good guys in the Syrian conflicts have long been forgotten. There are no saints among the major players there atm, so your Noble-prize winning fresh hope is every bit as cynical in picking sides as Putin is. What a fall from grace.
Ahh the good old relativist card. Everyone is bad therefore we can't choose sides. Pretty languid if you ask me. We should be able to choose sides in these debates, otherwise there are no solutions.
Choose sides all you want. It's just that the moral arguments are pathetic here when the choices are AQ and Assad. it has turned into a mini Cold War here, and I understand your frustration here. Putin eats Obama alive. Good speeches are not going to help here.
Putin has little ground to stand on. His economy is in ruin and he's clutching at straws to remain relevant on the world stage, but in the process is actually undermining himself even more.
A good piece in FT about Erdogan's displeasure with Putin and how it could undermine two critical gas deals for Russia since Turkey is its 2nd largest importer of gas.
Strains over Syria jeopardise Turkey-Russia economic ties
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/3a52ea3c-6ea1-11e5-aca9-d87542bf8673.html#axzz3oO6529TJ
Strains over Syria jeopardise Turkey-Russia economic ties
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/3a52ea3c-6ea1-11e5-aca9-d87542bf8673.html#axzz3oO6529TJ
He's a creep, and I will be happy to see a democratic Russia. My point still stands regarding his and Obama's roles in Syria. Both are cynical bastards trying to settle a score with total disregard for the Syrian people.
Well we can agree on that one. Its still a competition among the great powers, much as during the cold war.
Erdogan is a terror-harbouring, mass murdering grade A cnut. Having him on your side is hardly something to brag about.
You could argue that's something that's been prevalent for decades, really. Don't think it's ever gone away.
I'm not an Erdogan fan at all - the article does however highlight how Putin may be losing yet another economically important ally, this time one that is quite important to Russia in terms of gas exports, energy transit, tourism, and Turkish exports into Russia. He has little to gain in Syria and is taking yet another step at check mating himself with his partners.
Nobel prize for peace. Feck me. He even failed at being better than GW Bush.
Erdogan's days are numbered. It appears that the Turks have had enough of his Islamo-fascist rule. Even if he stayed I would thing his economy needs Russia every bit as the other way round.
Think about this though: Vietnam, Afghanistan (x2), Iraq... is it possible that hands-on intervention is the losing play strategically? Completely ignoring the casus belli (or lack thereof) of each case, has the intervening power come out strategically better of each situation?
Certainly the US could do more, in that they have the ability to do more. Not trying is definitely deliberate at this point. Maybe some 5 years ago you could say Putin was completely stealing the thunder. But Russia is not at its strongest, it just wants to appear as such (for its own public mostly).
Was a ridiculous decision to give him that award just because he won an election. GW was done anyways not like Obama forced him out of power. As far as beating GW's successor well that was always going to happen unless the Dem nominee are babies on stage during the debate.
What I still don´t understand is the support and loyalty of Putin to Asad. Not only now, but from the start. Possibly the Alawite regime is a major buyer of Russian weapons , but it has to be something else.
At the time the regime has been in real trouble they did not hesitate to appear in the region, something they had not done before. I imagine that misils and the maintenance of the bombers must have a very high cost and he has had no problem mixing with Hezbollah and the Iranian guard.
One thing is to help the pro Russians and other to go to Middle East to help a dictator.
I don´t know if Russia wants to take over the American influence in the region, if there is any long-term strategy or just it does to provoke ( as the flights of bombers by European air space ). Can be something related to pipelines, gas...?
What China has said about this? and Israel?
More or less a year ago Saudi Arabia dramatically lowered the price of oil , affecting the Russian industry that has bigger production costs . Can be this related to the russian interests in middle east?
Why SA decreased the prices?
It was a consensual decision with America to sink Russian economy?
At the time the regime has been in real trouble they did not hesitate to appear in the region, something they had not done before. I imagine that misils and the maintenance of the bombers must have a very high cost and he has had no problem mixing with Hezbollah and the Iranian guard.
One thing is to help the pro Russians and other to go to Middle East to help a dictator.
I don´t know if Russia wants to take over the American influence in the region, if there is any long-term strategy or just it does to provoke ( as the flights of bombers by European air space ). Can be something related to pipelines, gas...?
What China has said about this? and Israel?
More or less a year ago Saudi Arabia dramatically lowered the price of oil , affecting the Russian industry that has bigger production costs . Can be this related to the russian interests in middle east?
Why SA decreased the prices?
It was a consensual decision with America to sink Russian economy?
I always wondered about the last part at the time. It was a bit unprecedented, over 30+ years Saudi Arabia has never seemed to do anything with their oil production other than look to maximize their profits. Then they go with piling on the downwards pressure on the prices, and all of a sudden all of US/Europe's enemies/rivals bar China are negatively affected (Russia, Iran, even ISIS).
I really don't understand either. Maybe he wants to play the game a bit too, and has decided to side with Iran & Assad. But Russia has always stayed away since they have their own problems with Islamists in Chechnya.
Maybe its just PR for his own public. Maybe he wants to put himself in a strong position to bargain his vital support for Assad for some favorable compromise in the Ukraine (although I don't think the US give that much of a s*** about Assad and Syria). Maybe he just wants to see how far he can push the US, if he concludes they're weak he makes a further move for Ukraine and the Baltic states. I dunno... the last one really bothers me. After Cuba both powers pretty much understood that they weren't supposed to directly challenge each other, because that might lead to the unthinkable.
A brief summary of Russia's history in the region:
Putin’s Imperial Adventure in Syria
IN June 1772, Russian forces bombarded, stormed and captured Beirut, a fortress on the coast of Ottoman Syria. The Russians were backing their ally, a ruthless Arab despot. When they returned the next year, they occupied Beirut for almost six months. Then as now, they found Syrian politics a boiling cauldron of factional-ethnic strife, which they tried to simplify with cannonades and gunpowder.
Today, President Vladimir V. Putin has many motives in Syria, but we should keep in mind Russia’s vision of its traditional mission in the Middle East, and how it informs the Kremlin’s thinking. And not just the Kremlin: Russia’s Orthodox Church spokesman said that Mr. Putin’s intervention was part of “the special role our country has always played in the Middle East.”
Russia’s ties to the region are rooted in its self-assigned role as the defender of Orthodox Christianity, which it claimed to inherit from the Byzantine Caesars after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 — hence “czars.” The czars presented Moscow not just as a Third Rome, but also as a New Jerusalem, and protector of Christians in the Balkans and the Arab world, which, including the Holy Places of Jerusalem, were ruled by the Ottomans after 1517.
Devout peasants believed before they died that they should make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem and dip their shrouds in the Jordan. Until 1917, the czars blessed the waters of “the Jordan” every Jan. 6, in the Moscow, or later the Neva, River.
Russia’s first major intervention began in 1768, when Catherine the Great went to war with the Ottomans, and Count Alexei Orlov, the brother of her lover Grigory, sailed the Baltic fleet through the Strait of Gibraltar to rally rebellions in the Mediterranean. Recruiting Scottish admirals, Orlov annihilated the Ottoman fleet at Chesme, after which Russians temporarily dominated the eastern Mediterranean.
Meanwhile, in Egypt and Syria (which spanned present-day Lebanon and Israel as well), the respective Arab strongmen, Ali Pasha and Dahir al-Umar, had collaborated to seize Damascus from the Ottomans, but then lost it. Desperate, they approached Orlov and Catherine, who agreed to back them in return for possession of Jerusalem. Orlov’s ships bombarded Syrian cities, eventually occupying Beirut.
They left in 1774, when Russia dropped its Syrian allies in return for Ottoman concessions over Ukraine and Crimea. Yet a Russian Mediterranean base was now a strategic aim: Catherine and her partner Prince Potemkin annexed Crimea, where they founded a Black Sea fleet, then tried to negotiate a base on Minorca.
Catherine’s successors saw themselves as crusaders, with Russia destined to rule Constantinople and Jerusalem. Ultimately it was this aspiration — and a brawl over the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem between Russian-backed Orthodox and French-backed Catholic priests — that led to the Crimean War.
Russian defeat in 1856 persuaded Alexander II and the last czars to back off on using military force to dominate Jerusalem, preferring diplomacy and soft power. But during World War I Russian forces occupied northern Persia and invaded Ottoman Iraq, nearly taking Baghdad. In 1916, Nicholas II’s foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov, negotiated the Sykes-Picot-Sazonov Treaty, which promised Russia Istanbul, sections of Turkey and Kurdistan, and a share of Jerusalem — a Near Eastern empire foiled by the Bolshevik Revolution.
The atheistic Soviets inherited a secular version of these dreams: At Potsdam in 1945, Stalin demanded a “trusteeship” over Tripolitania, Libya, and later recognized Israel, hoping in both cases to gain a Mediterranean base. He was rebuffed, but the Cold War made Russia a Middle Eastern power, backing Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt with 50,000 Soviet advisers.
Until the recent intervention, the closest Russia came to fighting was the Israeli-Egyptian War of Attrition from 1967 to 1970, during which Soviet pilots dueled with Israelis. When Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, expelled the Russians, they cultivated a trio of dictators, Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Hafez al-Assad in Syria. All three, running merciless, dynastic-Mafia regimes behind the facade of socialistic parties, central planning and Stalinesque cults of personality, took quickly to their new benefactors: General Assad and Colonel Qaddafi were regularly photographed in moist fraternal hugs with the Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev. And General Assad, trained as a pilot in Russia, granted Moscow access to its Tartus naval base, now its last asset in the region.
After the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian influence collapsed and Moscow came to bitterly resent the Western interventions that destroyed Mr. Hussein and Colonel Qaddafi. American retreat from the region grants Mr. Putin, who sees himself in an unbroken tradition of Russian personal leadership and imperial-national power from the czars to today, the opportunity to diminish American prestige and project Russia as indispensable world arbiter. The rescue of Mr. Assad’s son Bashar while fighting the opposition and Islamic State dovetails with Russia’s struggle against Chechen jihadis who flock to the black caliphal banners — and success will bring leverage in Iran and Turkey, where Russia once had muscle.
That said, Mr. Putin may end up channeling Catherine and trade Syrian influence to end Western sanctions and secure annexed Crimea — for this military showmanship concerns Mr. Putin’s political survival. In some ways, his defense of Syria’s autocrat is a defense of his own authority against rebellion. The power formula in Russia is this: autocracy in the Kremlin in return for security and prosperity at home, glory abroad — and for now at least, there’s glamour in the excitement of this Oriental adventure, a televised “Beau Geste” with Sukhoi bombers.
When Alexander II launched exotic Asian wars, one of his ministers, Count Valuev, wrote, “there’s something erotic about all things on distant frontiers.” Moscow lacks the resources to replace America and will find in Syria a quagmire, but Russians feel that a great imperial Russia has always been a player in the Middle East — and boldness counts for much in this wild world.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/09/opinion/putins-imperial-adventure-in-syria.html?_r=0
@antihenry, I keep reading this kind of thing - "Mr. Putin, who sees himself in an unbroken tradition of Russian personal leadership and imperial-national power from the czars to today". Is there any evidence for this or is it just Western commentators finding non-existing links with Russia's imperial past to make a point? Does Putin regularly hark back to the days of Tsarist Empire?
Putin’s Imperial Adventure in Syria
IN June 1772, Russian forces bombarded, stormed and captured Beirut, a fortress on the coast of Ottoman Syria. The Russians were backing their ally, a ruthless Arab despot. When they returned the next year, they occupied Beirut for almost six months. Then as now, they found Syrian politics a boiling cauldron of factional-ethnic strife, which they tried to simplify with cannonades and gunpowder.
Today, President Vladimir V. Putin has many motives in Syria, but we should keep in mind Russia’s vision of its traditional mission in the Middle East, and how it informs the Kremlin’s thinking. And not just the Kremlin: Russia’s Orthodox Church spokesman said that Mr. Putin’s intervention was part of “the special role our country has always played in the Middle East.”
Russia’s ties to the region are rooted in its self-assigned role as the defender of Orthodox Christianity, which it claimed to inherit from the Byzantine Caesars after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 — hence “czars.” The czars presented Moscow not just as a Third Rome, but also as a New Jerusalem, and protector of Christians in the Balkans and the Arab world, which, including the Holy Places of Jerusalem, were ruled by the Ottomans after 1517.
Devout peasants believed before they died that they should make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem and dip their shrouds in the Jordan. Until 1917, the czars blessed the waters of “the Jordan” every Jan. 6, in the Moscow, or later the Neva, River.
Russia’s first major intervention began in 1768, when Catherine the Great went to war with the Ottomans, and Count Alexei Orlov, the brother of her lover Grigory, sailed the Baltic fleet through the Strait of Gibraltar to rally rebellions in the Mediterranean. Recruiting Scottish admirals, Orlov annihilated the Ottoman fleet at Chesme, after which Russians temporarily dominated the eastern Mediterranean.
Meanwhile, in Egypt and Syria (which spanned present-day Lebanon and Israel as well), the respective Arab strongmen, Ali Pasha and Dahir al-Umar, had collaborated to seize Damascus from the Ottomans, but then lost it. Desperate, they approached Orlov and Catherine, who agreed to back them in return for possession of Jerusalem. Orlov’s ships bombarded Syrian cities, eventually occupying Beirut.
They left in 1774, when Russia dropped its Syrian allies in return for Ottoman concessions over Ukraine and Crimea. Yet a Russian Mediterranean base was now a strategic aim: Catherine and her partner Prince Potemkin annexed Crimea, where they founded a Black Sea fleet, then tried to negotiate a base on Minorca.
Catherine’s successors saw themselves as crusaders, with Russia destined to rule Constantinople and Jerusalem. Ultimately it was this aspiration — and a brawl over the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem between Russian-backed Orthodox and French-backed Catholic priests — that led to the Crimean War.
Russian defeat in 1856 persuaded Alexander II and the last czars to back off on using military force to dominate Jerusalem, preferring diplomacy and soft power. But during World War I Russian forces occupied northern Persia and invaded Ottoman Iraq, nearly taking Baghdad. In 1916, Nicholas II’s foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov, negotiated the Sykes-Picot-Sazonov Treaty, which promised Russia Istanbul, sections of Turkey and Kurdistan, and a share of Jerusalem — a Near Eastern empire foiled by the Bolshevik Revolution.
The atheistic Soviets inherited a secular version of these dreams: At Potsdam in 1945, Stalin demanded a “trusteeship” over Tripolitania, Libya, and later recognized Israel, hoping in both cases to gain a Mediterranean base. He was rebuffed, but the Cold War made Russia a Middle Eastern power, backing Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt with 50,000 Soviet advisers.
Until the recent intervention, the closest Russia came to fighting was the Israeli-Egyptian War of Attrition from 1967 to 1970, during which Soviet pilots dueled with Israelis. When Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, expelled the Russians, they cultivated a trio of dictators, Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Hafez al-Assad in Syria. All three, running merciless, dynastic-Mafia regimes behind the facade of socialistic parties, central planning and Stalinesque cults of personality, took quickly to their new benefactors: General Assad and Colonel Qaddafi were regularly photographed in moist fraternal hugs with the Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev. And General Assad, trained as a pilot in Russia, granted Moscow access to its Tartus naval base, now its last asset in the region.
After the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian influence collapsed and Moscow came to bitterly resent the Western interventions that destroyed Mr. Hussein and Colonel Qaddafi. American retreat from the region grants Mr. Putin, who sees himself in an unbroken tradition of Russian personal leadership and imperial-national power from the czars to today, the opportunity to diminish American prestige and project Russia as indispensable world arbiter. The rescue of Mr. Assad’s son Bashar while fighting the opposition and Islamic State dovetails with Russia’s struggle against Chechen jihadis who flock to the black caliphal banners — and success will bring leverage in Iran and Turkey, where Russia once had muscle.
That said, Mr. Putin may end up channeling Catherine and trade Syrian influence to end Western sanctions and secure annexed Crimea — for this military showmanship concerns Mr. Putin’s political survival. In some ways, his defense of Syria’s autocrat is a defense of his own authority against rebellion. The power formula in Russia is this: autocracy in the Kremlin in return for security and prosperity at home, glory abroad — and for now at least, there’s glamour in the excitement of this Oriental adventure, a televised “Beau Geste” with Sukhoi bombers.
When Alexander II launched exotic Asian wars, one of his ministers, Count Valuev, wrote, “there’s something erotic about all things on distant frontiers.” Moscow lacks the resources to replace America and will find in Syria a quagmire, but Russians feel that a great imperial Russia has always been a player in the Middle East — and boldness counts for much in this wild world.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/09/opinion/putins-imperial-adventure-in-syria.html?_r=0
@antihenry, I keep reading this kind of thing - "Mr. Putin, who sees himself in an unbroken tradition of Russian personal leadership and imperial-national power from the czars to today". Is there any evidence for this or is it just Western commentators finding non-existing links with Russia's imperial past to make a point? Does Putin regularly hark back to the days of Tsarist Empire?
I'm sure Putin is very ambitious leader and wants to leave behind a legacy of someone who brought Russia back as a major player in the world politics. As for Tsarist Empire, I think his past as a KGB colonel makes it more likely that he wants some of that Soviet geopolitical influence back since USSR were quite a force in the Middle East back in the day. His actions appeal to the deeply ingrained feelings of the Russian 'siege mentality'. Part of it is that the West is always the enemy and that Russians won't allow anyone to tell them what to do.
Some of it is indoctrinated into the masses by media, but a lot of it comes from what Russians learned the hard way throughout their history. There's always a lack of trust between Russia and the 'West' and both Russian and western leaders have used it in the past and still do now to pursue their own goals. Putin is no different, but he's not the devil they're making him out to be. He just upsets the world order created over the last twenty or so years by the US and its vassals in a vacuum created by the fall of Soviet Union and they're understandably unhappy about this.
https://news.yahoo.com/putin-slams-us-syria-says-partners-mush-brains-113850683.html
Moscow (AFP) - President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday slammed Washington for refusing to share intelligence with Russia on Syria, accusing it of muddled thinking.
"Now, we often hear that our pilots are striking the wrong targets, not IS," Putin said at an investment forum in Moscow explaining that Russia had asked Washington to provide a list of targets.
But Washington declined.
"'No, we are not ready for this' was the answer," Putin quoted them as saying.
"Then we thought again and asked another question: then tell us where we should not strike. No answer too," he said, adding: "That is not a joke. I did not make this up."
"How is it possible to work together?" he asked.
"I think some of our partners simply have mush for brains, they do not have a clear understanding of what really happens in the country and what goals they are seeking to achieve."
Moscow (AFP) - President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday slammed Washington for refusing to share intelligence with Russia on Syria, accusing it of muddled thinking.
"Now, we often hear that our pilots are striking the wrong targets, not IS," Putin said at an investment forum in Moscow explaining that Russia had asked Washington to provide a list of targets.
But Washington declined.
"'No, we are not ready for this' was the answer," Putin quoted them as saying.
"Then we thought again and asked another question: then tell us where we should not strike. No answer too," he said, adding: "That is not a joke. I did not make this up."
"How is it possible to work together?" he asked.
"I think some of our partners simply have mush for brains, they do not have a clear understanding of what really happens in the country and what goals they are seeking to achieve."
thought he was doing better bombing without the west's help because he had better intelligence in Syria? Or is he just trying to deflect responsibility for something?
I might be completely wrong but it seems to me that Russia's bombing is done using Assad's intelligence. They're hitting just about everyone bar Assad's men.
So it's hardly a surprise that Washington aren't sharing intelligence with Russia if that intelligence could be passed on.
Surprise surprise, the Iraqi government realises its fight against IS is more effective when partnering with the Russians, compared to flaccid US attempts.
Correct. It would be a bit silly to expect the US to contribute intelligence for the purpose of bombing non-ISIS elements and propping up Assad when Obama has been saying Assad has to go.
They could always just share intelligence regarding ISIS and no other groups. Why would the US care if the Russians use it to start bombing ISIS. Surely its also in their interest that ISIS are weakened
It's not overt it's covert, it's about the topic it covers and what it leaves out, what is given prominence and what is excluded, and the language used to describe a particular event (threat neutralised vs civilians killed, coup vs popular revolt, autocratic ruler vs elected government)
On the other hand, it could also go full-on Pravda
NYT:
https://prod01-cdn05.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/10/nyt3-265x300.png
https://prod01-cdn05.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/10/nyt5-1000x571.png
https://prod01-cdn05.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/10/cnn-300x107.png
CNN:
https://prod01-cdn05.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/10/cnn2-540x377.png
https://prod01-cdn05.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/10/nyt3-265x300.png
https://prod01-cdn05.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/10/nyt5-1000x571.png
https://prod01-cdn05.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/10/cnn-300x107.png
CNN:
https://prod01-cdn05.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/10/cnn2-540x377.png
It's fine to plant your flag on a particular side of the debate, but what is this....... lol
My guess is sinister. Ratifying the nation, gaining recognition that Russia still exist and dangerous, clearing up manpower and armament stockpile, issue diversion, new allies, political gain in the future. Alot to gain. You know these madman aren't thinking with everyday logic of peaceloving (and neither any country involved in this mess tbf)
So, how many refugees are Russia taking then?
Putin asked specifically for information about ISIS, Putin was even quoted in the post you quoted:
"Now, we often hear that our pilots are striking the wrong targets, not IS," Putin said at an investment forum in Moscow explaining that Russia had asked Washington to provide a list of targets.
But it would still be silly to expect the US to help in defeating ISIS anyway.
So who has Putin been bombing?
Anyone seeking to depose Assad apparently.