The New Time of Troubles, Part II — Putin Overruled the General Staff

Part I: https://johnhelmer.net/the-kremlins-oprichniki-versus-the-general-staffs-prigozhniki-in-the-new-time-of-troubles/

Military sources in Moscow have told a tale of President Vladimir Putin’s decision not to defend the Syrian Arab Army and the Damascus government of Bashar al-Assad. That decision, the sources claim, was taken at least two weeks before the Turkish break-out from Idlib began on November 27, and was conveyed to Assad personally by December 6.  

It had been hinted at four days earlier, on December 2, when Iran’s President, Masoud Pezeshkian, made an urgent telephone call to Putin. In principle, the Kremlin announced, Putin and Pezeshkian agreed on “unconditional support for the efforts of Syria’s legitimate authorities to restore constitutional order and maintain the country’s territorial integrity.”  

In practice, there was a Russian condition. Putin told Pezeshkian that Russian anti-aircraft units in Syria would not operate against Israeli attack and defend the Iranian air bridge to Khmeimim for the troops and arms which Assad had been requesting urgently,  and which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was ready to send. Putin also told the Iranian President that Russian ground forces and artillery would not engage Turkish forces moving southward, and would not bomb them from the air. 

By the time Putin and Pezeshkian were speaking, after days of the closed-door debate with the General Staff, Putin believed he had the word of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Russia’s principal military bases at Tartus and Khmeimim would not be attacked and Russian forces not threatened.  Their pre-condition was that Putin would not encourage or defend Iranian reinforcements. 

The General Staff and GRU warned Putin that Erdogan and Netanyahu could not be trusted, and that without Russian military force to deter them, plus Iranian troops,  they would take over Syrian territory – the Turks down the coast to the Lebanese border and to Damascus; the Israelis across the Golan and the Quneitra buffer zone into the southern outskirts of Damascus.

The Security Council met openly only once with Putin during this debate – on December 5. The official communiqué does not report that Syria was discussed.    

“Russia does not betray friends in difficult situations,” was the line the Kremlin told the Foreign Ministry to instruct its diplomats to announce after Assad had landed in Moscow on December 8, adding the footnote that “a deal has been done to ensure the safety of Russian military bases.”   The Ministry spokesman, Maria Zakharova,  did not go so far. “Our number-one priority is ensuring the safety of the Russian citizens currently residing in Syria, and protecting Russia’s property and its diplomatic, military and other missions,” she said.  

Zakharova was signalling there was no deal for the bases short of evacuation from Syria, with terms of safe passage still to be negotiated with the Turks. The camouflage for this is a multinational negotiation the Foreign Ministry is proposing for Russia, Turkey, Iran, the Gulf Arab states, and the United Nations special envoy for Syria.     

Asked what reaction Russia has to the Israeli occupation of southern Syria, Zakharova said: “it is incumbent upon all members of the international community, especially neighbouring nations, to exhibit restraint and an elevated level of responsibility by refraining from actions that could provoke further deterioration of the situation in Syria.” Asked what role Israel and the US had played in the invasion and military coup in Syria, she replied: “The situation is being analyzed. There will be even more facts qualifying what happened in Syria.”  

Zakharova was not asked for the ministry’s assessment of the part Erdogan had played.  Instead, she said: “Our country respects the leaders of friendly countries, maintains dialogue with them and develops relations with them.”  

The Kremlin record of Putin’s direct telephone conversation with Erdogan on December 3 claims Putin told Erdogan he should agree “to stop radical groups’ terrorist aggression against the Syrian state.”  Erdogan, who initiated the call, didn’t agree.  

The General Staff understood Putin to believe that he had the agreement of Turkey, Israel and indirectly of the United States for a de facto partition of Syria into four military control zones, like Germany following Adolf Hitler’s suicide in Berlin on April 30, 1945. The General Staff warned Putin that Russian military capacities in the bases would be too weak to enforce his verbal exchanges with Erdogan and Netanyahu; that a Russian control zone around the bases could not be protected from a forced evacuation; and that if Putin agreed to this, he was risking the destruction of Russian credibility with strategic allies, Iran first of all, then China. 

Ex-President Dmitry Medvedev was then sent to Beijing on December 12 to explain and assure President Xi Jinping.  Xi has not been reassured.  The General Staff messaged Putin, “We told you so”. Now read on.

A hint is surfacing in the Russian military blogs – endorsed by the GRU-linked reporter Yevgeny Krutikov — that if and when the Tartus naval base is evacuated by the Russians, an alternative naval base arrangement may be made at Tobruk in Libya. 

A well-informed Moscow source comments there is no surprise in Moscow at Putin’s decision-making to favour Israel and Turkey at the expense of the Arabs and Iran. The source also warns that the surprise expressed by Anglo-American podcasters who support Putin in the Ukraine war “reflects their readiness to say what they believe the Kremlin wants to hear – with or without reward.”

An accurate guide to the Kremlin propaganda line right now, the source indicates, is a Moscow-based American academic named Andrew Korybko. He has turned the General Staff’s warning upside down, defending Putin’s decision to accommodate Israel and Turkey in Syria as reflecting the realistic military balance in the Middle East right now.  “Putin is a proud lifelong philo-Semite,” Korybko says, “who never shared the Resistance’s unifying anti-Zionist ideology, instead always expressing very deep respect for Jews and the State of Israel…Russia dodged a bullet by wisely choosing not to ally with the now-defeated [Arab-Iranian] Resistance Axis since it would have needlessly ruined its relations with Israel, the undisputable victor of the West Asian Wars. Putin made the right choice, which was always driven by his rational calculation of what was in Russia’s objective interests as a state, not due to ‘Zionist influence’.”  

“This is toadying,” the Moscow source comments, but indicative. “The toad is giving voice to those who think, plan, decide. He is giving the clearest official line on it all.”

A Moscow military source suspects that Putin has “traded” with the General Staff, exchanging the evacuation of the Russian bases in Syria with permission to accelerate missile operations against the regime in Kiev, against US and NATO planning and operations units in the Ukraine,   and intensification of the electric war in Kiev, Lvov and western Ukraine.  The source adds that the test of this “trade” will be whether the General Staff launches strikes over Friday and Saturday in retaliation for the resumption of US-Ukrainian ATACMS launches on Wednesday night against Taganrog.