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Can Russia Be Persuaded to Turn Against Assad? Not Very Likely

The Washington Post wants Russia to cooperate in toppling Assad: As long as it has Russia’s diplomatic and material support, the Assad regime is more likely to hold together. That’s why the high-level lobbying campaign at the Security Council is important, and it’s why the Obama administration should place Russian cooperation on Syria at the […]

The Washington Post wants Russia to cooperate in toppling Assad:

As long as it has Russia’s diplomatic and material support, the Assad regime is more likely to hold together. That’s why the high-level lobbying campaign at the Security Council is important, and it’s why the Obama administration should place Russian cooperation on Syria at the top of the bilateral agenda with Moscow.

The editorial’s argument is that Russia should help topple Assad or risk its interests in Syria in the event that Assad’s regime collapses anyway, but this isn’t the way that the U.S. or any other major power would view the prospect of regime collapse in a client state. Essentially, Moscow should gamble with its interests and dump the client that it has in the hope that the next government would be willing to confirm earlier agreements made by the regime that was just overthrown. There is no suggestion here that the U.S. should offer Russia anything to give it an incentive to do this, and it’s not clear what the U.S. or any other Western government could offer to make it worth their while. What is more likely is that the same people urging that the administration make this a top priority with the Russians would be outraged if Obama offered anything to try to win Russian support.

Soner Cagaptay explained earlier this week why the naval base in Syria matters so much to Moscow:

So, “lose Tartus and lose access to the warm waters” is how Moscow views the end of al-Assad’s rule. Having said farewell to all its Mediterranean client states and bases in the past decades – from Egypt, which evicted Russia in the 1970s, to Serbia, which became a landlocked state following the dissolution of the last Yugoslavia in 2003 – Moscow cannot afford to lose Tartus, the last link between Russian foreign policy today and Catherine the Great’s grand strategy.

This makes sense, and it also makes it much less likely that Russia is going to cooperate. Cagaptay thinks that opposition promises of access to the base will bring Russia around, but that may not be the case. Suppose that Russia joins the anti-Assad bandwagon at the Security Council, but Assad and his allies manage to retain power with continued Iranian backing. That would put Russia once again in the absurd position of having created an opening for outside intervention that it strongly opposes. Meanwhile, Russia seems to be interested in going an entirely different route:

Moscow has long feared that any UN move would be a precursor to military action similar to the events that led to the Nato operation in Libya. Gennady Gatilov, deputy foreign minister, told the Interfax news agency that Russia would reject the current draft because “it leaves the door open for intervention”.

In what analysts saw as an attempt to pre-empt the UN debate, the Kremlin said on Monday that it was trying to put together talks in Moscow between Damascus and the Syria opposition.

Those talks will probably not happen, and they might lead to nothing if they did, but Moscow seems uninterested in punitive U.N. measures.

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