Ignoring Trump, who has less to do with this subject than bumblebees do ...
Putin’s Mediterranean Power Play in SyriaRussia's activities in Syria are less about saving Assad and more about restoring Moscow's place in the key crossroads of the eastern Mediterranean.
Russian military action in Syria formally began this week, with the purportedly anti-terrorist mission reportedly launching dumb bombs at everybody but terrorists. But President Vladimir Putin’s dispatch of warships and fighter aircraft isn’t ultimately about aiding his embattled ally, Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. Rather, it’s the latest expression of a geopolitical longing that’s embedded deep in Russia’s DNA: to establish a political and military foothold in the eastern Mediterranean.
Russian intervention is about far more than supporting Assad. It is a way to ensure that Moscow has a place at the table when Syria’s future is ultimately decided. Putin’s focus, in other words, is not on the presidential palace in Damascus, but 100 miles north, at the recently revamped port of Tartus, Russia’s only naval base on foreign soil and one that just happens to lie astride NATO’s southern flank.
“They don’t care whether Assad stays or not. They want to secure their interests, and they want to keep access to the Mediterranean for sure,” said Sijbren de Jong, an analyst at the Hague Center for Strategic Studies.
Russia’s Mediterranean adventure began centuries ago and has doggedly continued through tsars and commissars and wars hot and cold. Peter the Great turned Russia into a maritime nation with the capture of the fortress of Azov in 1696, which opened the Black Sea to Russian ships. But the Black Sea is a stoppered bottle unless it comes with control over the Turkish straits and the eastern Mediterranean. That quest, simple in conception but elusive in practice, explains much of Imperial Russian history in the 18th and 19th centuries, Soviet efforts in the 20th, and post-Soviet Russian gambits in the 21st, including Putin’s seemingly sudden lunge into the Syrian civil war now.
“More and more, there is a focus on the eastern Mediterranean, where Russia has strategic opportunities,” said Jeff Mankoff, acting director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “There is a perception that the United States is pulling out, and given the preexisting position that Russia has in Syria, it can do more to project power in the region.”
Read more:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/10/02/putins-mediterranean-power-play-in-syria-navy-tartus-fleet/
