In the PRIO Blog Post: Will the Russian-Ukrainian War Resonate in Syria?, Research Professor Pavel Baev and Senior Researcher Pinar Tank writes about the war's potential ramifications on regional dynamics in the Middle East.
Presently, Putin aims at a much greater victory in Ukraine, but the inherent weaknesses in the Russian military might, that were not really exposed through the Syrian campaign, have become starkly exposed, Baev and Tank argue. The inability of the Russian General Staff to execute a sequence of massive air strikes is particularly surprising, and the Syria-style combat missions performed by a pair of aircraft targeting (often very approximately) a stationary (and not necessarily military) object are quite ineffectual.
As the Russian armed forces are struggling to achieve a modicum of success in several stalled offensive operations from Kyiv in the North to Kharkiv in the East, and Mykolaiv in the South, the capacity for sustaining combat activities in Syria is inevitably shrinking.
The authors argue that Russia has made itself a major force in assuring the survival and dominance of the brutal al-Assad regime, but it has never established a solid Syrian support base for its intervention. Moscow’s international profile is now severely compromised, and its military might is badly damaged by the ill-planned and resource-consuming war. In the matter of a few weeks rather than months, Russian top brass is set to re-evaluate the sustainability of and rationale for the costly exercise in power projection to Syria.
Read the full PRIO Blog Post: Will the Russian-Ukrainian War Resonate in Syria? here.
