The downfall of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria has humiliated his main backer, Russia, exposing the limits of the Kremlin’s military power and global influence.
Yet to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the loss of his closest Middle Eastern ally may only be a temporary setback in his quest for a much greater geopolitical prize: triumph in Ukraine.
Military and political analysts said winning the war in Ukraine has become an all-encompassing goal for Mr. Putin. That outcome, they said, would justify to the Russian leader the conflict’s tremendous human and economic losses, safeguard Russia’s statehood and global stature and compensate for strategic failures elsewhere, such as in Syria.
“Putin’s bet on the war in Ukraine is so high that a victory there would bring Russia a payout of historic proportions: It’s all or nothing,” wrote Aleksandr Baunov, a political analyst at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, a research group. “If he thinks the fate of the world is being decided in the Donbas, then the future of Syria will be decided there as well.”
In the short term, as Moscow maneuvers to keep its military bases in Syria, Mr. Putin could intensify his costly offensive in Ukraine to recover some prestige. Pro-war Russian commentators have called on Mr. Putin to do just that, while also demanding tougher peace conditions in Ukraine to avoid the kind of inconclusive cease-fire that ultimately led to Mr. al-Assad’s downfall.
Both scenarios would complicate the incoming Trump administration’s promise to swiftly end the fighting in Ukraine.
As Mr. al-Assad’s regime crumbled, President-elect Donald J. Trump taunted Russia for its failure to save its ally and called on Mr. Putin to strike a deal on Ukraine, without explaining what it might look like.
Russia is “in a weakened state right now,” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, on Sunday, “because of Ukraine and a bad economy.”
“I know Vladimir well. This is his time to act,” Mr. Trump added.
Analysts have pointed out that one of the most consistent features of Mr. Putin’s opaque 25-year rule is his aversion to acting from such obvious positions of weakness or submitting to external pressures.
Mr. Putin’s own descriptions of what a Russian victory in Ukraine would look like have always been vague. By last year, the Russian Army had abandoned its failed attempts to mount grand offensives that could topple the Ukrainian state. It has concentrated instead on Ukraine’s east, simultaneously pressuring Kyiv’s forces in multiple parts of the front and bombing Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure.
Military experts have interpreted this strategy as an attempt to exhaust Ukraine’s military and society, and force Kyiv to the negotiating table.
Mr. Putin has implied that any peace deal must allow Russia to keep at least the territory that it has already occupied, and guarantee Ukraine’s military neutrality, meaning no entry into NATO. Russia also wants to suppress Ukraine’s military capacity.
“We must not talk about a cease-fire for half an hour or half a year, so that they could resupply ammunition,” Mr. Putin said at a forum in southern Russia last month, referring to Ukraine.
The Ukrainian government has repeatedly rejected any peace conditions that would formalize the loss of its territory or bar the country from seeking NATO membership.
In the short term, Moscow’s setback in Syria could shrink the room for compromise further.
Russia’s pro-war commentators have reacted to Mr. al-Assad’s downfall with bewilderment and anger, lamenting the lives of hundreds of Russian soldiers who died propping up a Syrian Army that melted away under a rebel assault.The demands of the war in Ukraine had reduced Russia’s ability to prevent the collapse.
On Sunday, one prominent Russian ultranationalist, Zakhar Prilepin, called Syria “our catastrophe.”
Many of these commentators said that Russia must learn from Mr. al-Assad’s mistakes.
“The conclusion is obvious: It’s best not to leave frozen conflicts,” said Oleg Tsaryov, a pro-Russian former Ukrainian lawmaker who now writes about the war from exile in Russia. “If a conflict is frozen, the enemy will undoubtedly exploit your moment of weakness,” he wrote in a written response to questions.
Mr. Tsaryov said that to protect its interests, Russia must force Ukraine to accept a peace deal that, among other things, bars the country from NATO membership and forces Ukraine to accept the loss of regions annexed by Russia.
“Contested territories are a cause for endless conflict,” he said.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has said recently that his country may accept a temporary loss of some occupied territory, but that it would never acquiesce to permanent border changes. Polls show that most Ukrainians support this view.
Some pro-war Russian commentators went further than Mr. Tsaryov, and called on the Russian military to respond to the embarrassment in Syria with even more brutality in Ukraine.
“This is precisely the time to show extreme toughness, and even cruelty” in Ukraine, Aleksei Pilko, an ultranationalist Russian historian, wrote on the Telegram messaging app on Sunday. He called for targeted killings of Ukrainian officials and more Russian airstrikes against Ukrainian government buildings and energy infrastructure.
Like Mr. Putin, the ultranationalist Russian commentators have offered few details about how a depleted Russian Army could achieve a Ukrainian capitulation that would satisfy their demands. But they are united in their calls for the army to step up its assaults.
Whether Mr. Putin listens to these or any other arguments is a different matter.
Vasily Kashin, a political scientist at Moscow’s state-run Higher School of Economics, has called the outpouring of nationalistic fervor following the Syria debacle “media noise.”
He said the Kremlin would continue prosecuting the war according to its plan, and was unlikely to be distracted by peripheral events that had little to no impact on the battlefield.
Mr. Putin has certainly long cultivated an image as a master strategist unperturbed by the ebb and flow of daily events. Still, the blow inflicted by Mr. al-Assad’s collapse to the Russian leader’s global reputation could yet compel him to make a show of strength in Ukraine, said Tatiana Stanovaya, a Russian political scientist at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
“He may be tempted to show that Russia is not defeated, and that it knows what it is doing,” she said. “And that may lead him to doubt what he is willing to concede in Ukraine.”
To show strength, Mr. Putin could make new conditions for peace talks, or he could escalate airstrikes, following through on his frequent threats. A U.S. official, speaking anonymously to discuss sensitive intelligence, said on Wednesday that Russia could hit Ukraine with another Oreshnik, a new and powerful ballistic missile, in the coming days.
The Ukrainian government has repeatedly said that Mr. Putin’s threats of escalation are a bluff, because the Russian military is already fighting at maximum capacity as its invasion nears its fourth year.
To some Russian analysts, the debate over Mr. Putin’s potential response to Mr. al-Assad’s downfall masks a more consequential lesson of Syria’s 13-year civil war: the difficulty of winning a protracted conflict.
The Russian military’s campaign to corral Mr. al-Assad’s enemies into enclaves proved ultimately futile, an illusion of victory that could yet resonate in Ukraine.
“In a modern world, a victory is only possible in a fast and short war,” Ruslan Pukhov, a prominent Russian military expert, wrote in a column about Syria for the Russian business newspaper Kommersant on Sunday. “If you can’t secure your success in a military-political sphere, then eventually you will lose, no matter what you do.”
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