Putin's military intervention in Syria, explained

Updated by Max Fisher on September 30, 2015, 6:07 p.m. ET @Max_Fisher max@vox.com

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Russian President Vladimir Putin.Sasha Mordovets/Getty

Russia has moved a small but significant military force into Syria, adding a volatile new dimension to Syria's now four-year civil war. And on Wednesday, Russia made its first official airstrikes in Syria.

The Russian installation, in a couple of military sites along Syria's Mediterranean coast, is far short of a full invasion force, but it's still a meaningful escalation, potentially making Russia a direct participant in the war for the first time. Russia has moved in a few hundred troops, 28 fighter jets, and 14 helicopter gunships and transports, as well as six tanks, 15 artillery pieces, and some other equipment.

On the surface, Russia's aim seems clear: to shore up Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, a longtime Russian ally and proxy who has been doing poorly in the war, and to project Russian power in the world. In Washington, DC, Vladimir Putin's escalation is being hailed as a brilliant strategic move and a humiliation for the US. (DC political pundits remain by far Putin's most loyal fan base outside the former Soviet Union.)

But there's a lot more going on here than might first meet the eye. Here are eight things to know about the Russian intervention in Syria, which help explain what's actually happening and what it means.

1) Putin's intervention isn't an act of brilliant grand strategy. It's an act of fear and unlikely to succeed.

If Putin's goal is to prop up Bashar al-Assad, then contributing Russian airstrikes and attack helicopters (the latter of which are present in Syria but don't appear to have been used yet) will help Assad on the margins, but they won't change the fundamental calculus of the war.

For one thing, this is likely to exacerbate outrage against Assad across the region, among non-jihadists and jihadists alike, and boost legitimacy of groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra that are Assad's greatest threat. For another, the Putin-Assad coalition, joined by Iran and Hezbollah, is dominated by Shias and other non-Sunnis, which will deepen the sectarian dynamics of the war. Given that Assad represents a sectarian minority in Syria, that's not a winning formula for him.

So why is Putin doing this? As Amanda Taub has written, Syria is the sum of many of his greatest fears: fear of anarchy, fear of populist uprisings, fear of Western meddling, fear of any authoritarian regime's downfall, and fear of an ever-encroaching global chaos — all forces that Putin believes could one day be turned against him. What he's pursuing is not a brilliant, grand strategy of expanding Russian power, but rather a desperate effort to stave off these forces that so frighten him.

So if someone tells you Putin is a genius chess master who's just checkmated America, don't buy it for a second.

2) Putin claims to target ISIS, but that's probably not who he's really after

Russia says that its airstrikes are against ISIS, and when Putin spoke at the United Nations General Assembly this week he described his Syria intervention as an effort against that group. But his first, second, and third objective is to shore up Bashar al-Assad, and that means targeting not ISIS but rather non-ISIS rebel groups. And, in practice, that is so far what Russia's forces appear to be doing.

The reasons for this are pretty simple. Assad's greatest threat isn't ISIS, a group that Assad in fact tolerates, but the myriad non-ISIS rebel groups in the country. Some of those groups are jihadists (al-Qaeda's local branch, Jabhat al-Nusra, for one), and some of them just want to fight Assad's atrocities. But they're who really threaten the Syrian dictator, and despite Moscow's rhetoric, they're whom Russia is really targeting.

3) Russia's intervention is aimed in no small part at Iran

STR/AFP/Getty

Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in Tehran with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in 2007. (STR/AFP/Getty)

Russia, once a global power with proxies in every corner of the globe, doesn't have many allies outside of the former Soviet republics these days. One of the last is Syria, which aligned with Moscow back in the 1970s when Bashar's father, Hafez al-Assad, was in charge.

Syria has long balanced itself between its two sponsors, Iran and Russia, often privileging the latter because it is more powerful and more important. That began to change in 2011 and 2012, when the Syrian civil war began. Assad relied on Russia's diplomatic protection against Western intervention, as well as Russian military hardwire. But he came to rely much more on Iran, which provided not just hardware but military officers and boots on the grounds, as well as support from the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

As the Syrian war dragged on, Bashar al-Assad became less of a Russian proxy and more of an Iranian proxy, with Tehran practically running Assad's war for him. Russia's traditional links to the Syrian army and intelligence became less important and less useful. In August 2013, Assad disobeyed Moscow, using chemical weapons against Russia's wishes.

It looked like Moscow was losing its last remaining foothold in the Middle East — and the Iranians, not the Americans or the British, were pushing them out. (Meanwhile, Iran also signed the nuclear deal, which Moscow worries could lead Tehran to ease ties with the West and thus become less reliant itself on Russian support.)

If Moscow wanted to retain its last toehold in the Middle East, it needed to shore up its influence in Syria, specifically with the Assad government. This military intervention makes Russia a significant player within Syria again. It forces Assad to once again rely on Moscow. It also changes things within the Assad regime, making military commanders and other types who have closer ties to Moscow more relevant.

Yes, Russia and Iran are all still on the same side, yes they will continue to cooperate on their shared goal of propping up Assad, and yes Tehran has officially welcomed the intervention. But Moscow also wants to shore up its waning influence and significance in Syria, and one of the biggest threats to that right now is Iran.

4) This may also be about striking a grand bargain with the West

There is also a theory that Putin, in addition to reasserting and protecting Russian influence in Syria, is maybe hoping this will give him something he can use to strike a grand bargain with the US and Europe.

There are two versions of this theory. One version says that Putin wants to stir up trouble in Syria, threatening Western interests there, in order to force the West to grant him concessions. Another version says that Putin believes he can offer Russian military assistance and intelligence against Islamist extremists in Syria as a prize to trade in exchange for Western concessions.

Personally, I find the latter more convincing; since he took office in 2000, Putin has consistently portrayed Russia and the West as natural allies against the threat of Islamist extremism, which state media has played up considerably. And recent noises out of the Kremlin suggest that Putin wants to present this as an opportunity for partnership with the West, not as Russia holding Syria hostage.

But regardless of which version of the theory you find more persuasive, the result is the same: that Putin would like to trade off Russian involvement in Syria for a grand bargain with the West, one that addresses not just Syria but also Ukraine and Western sanctions against Russia — two issues far more important to Putin.

There was speculation that Putin, in his UN address on Monday and private meeting that afternoon with Obama, would offer his grand bargain with the West, in which he would likely call for cooperation against terrorism (particularly in Syria), some sort of mediated settlement in Ukraine, and an end to Western sanctions on Russia. In public, Putin only offered the anti-terrorism cooperation, inviting world leaders to a dubious sounding "anti-Hitler coalition" against ISIS that he couched in heavy criticism of the West. It remains to be seen whether he'll try to seek anything more than that.

5) This could backfire by making Russian troops a lightning rod for extremist groups

There are a few jihadist groups fighting in Syria, the biggest of which are ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Qaeda's local branch), and that are competing against one another for ideological legitimacy. Whichever group can best position itself as representing Sunni jihadism, the thinking goes, will get more recruits and donations, and thus win more territory on the battlefield.

If you are a jihadist group looking to claim the mantle of global jihadism, there have to be few targets as attractive as a foreign invasion force from a Christian empire. Those Russian troops and fighter jets might be safely based on the coast, far from the front lines, but they could become a real lightning rod for jihadist attacks.

Recall that ISIS, when it captured a Jordanian pilot who'd gone down after launching airstrikes against the group, videotaped its torture and murder of the pilot, using him as a major propaganda tool. And that was a pilot from a fellow Sunni Arab country. One shudders to imagine how eager ISIS, or another group like Jabhat al-Nusra, would be to get ahold of a Russian pilot — something that is made even more possible if Russia also uses the attack helicopters it's deployed to Syria, much less its small force of ground troops.

In 1979, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan inspired a mass jihadist call to arms from across the Muslim world to fight the non-Muslim invaders. So did the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. This Russian intervention is much, much smaller, and the reaction will likely be smaller as well, but jihadist groups may still try to exploit it by targeting Russian forces.

This doesn't just put those Russians at greater risk. It gives Syria's often fractured extremist groups a cause to rally behind, something that can temporarily bring them together even as they continue fighting one another elsewhere in the country.

6) Russia currently has little ability to escalate

Some of the commentary on Russia's intervention has expressed concern that although the initial force is relatively small, perhaps Russia will build it out into a larger invasion that really can change the overall trajectory of the war.

But geography will get in the way of that. Logistically, it is not really feasible for Russia to significantly increase the size of its force and thus escalate its position in Syria. Russian military flights to Syria have to get there somehow, but that typically requires flying over countries that bar such flights.

Russia cannot ship the equipment there via its navy without being spotted as it passes through Turkey, and even if it wanted to move in its equipment in broad daylight, this would be difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, if it's even within Russian capabilities.

In other words, while this deployment does matter on its own, do not expect Russia to do what it did in Ukraine, and quietly sneak in enough military equipment to radically alter the military balance on the ground.

7) This is not yet a game changer for Syria...

Putin's escalation in Syria is being overhyped a bit in the press. Partly this is because it's Putin, with whom Americans have sort of an obsession, eager to see his weaknesses as strengths and portray his often shortsighted and reactive foreign policy as the work of a strategic genius.

Partly Russia's escalation is also getting overhyped as people in Washington view it through the lenses of various preexisting opinions. People who see President Obama as a bumbling weakling are often eager to hold up Putin as the counterpoint, the strong leader whose bold decisiveness humiliates our own feckless leader. People who wish for the US to intervene in Syria may be more willing to see the Russian force as a decisive because it supports their view that outside intervention can be a game changer.

But ultimately this is not yet a game changer for the Syrian civil war. It is not a large enough force to turn the tide of the war, particularly as the war remains split four ways between Assad, Kurdish groups, ISIS, and non-ISIS rebels.

Yes, American policy on Syria has been a failure, on this we can all agree. But that does not mean that any Russian policy on Syria is therefore a success. As one US official told the New York Times, speaking of Putin's effort in Syria, "Knock yourself out."

Russia's force does make it much harder for the US or another Western power to launch its own on-the-ground intervention force in Syria. These forces would not be on the same side, and neither Russia nor the US wants to risk World War III over Syria by putting themselves in a position to directly fight one another, either deliberately or accidentally. But the truth is that a Western ground intervention in Syria was probably never going to happen anyway, so this only changes things by ruling out something that already had been ruled out.

8) ...Unless Russia tries to wipe out US-backed Syrian rebels

All that said, there is one way that this could escalate: if Russia's air power in Syria ends up seeming to overwhelmingly target Syrian rebels who are supported by the United States.

Russia is there to protect Assad, after all. While the US has forbidden rebels trained under its Pentagon program from fighting Assad's forces, Assad might nonetheless deem them a potential threat worthy of Russian bombing. Something else that complicates this: Russian state media coverage of Syria has been extremely simplistic, conflating ISIS and al-Qaeda with more moderate rebel groups, making it more politically difficult for Russian to bomb one group but not another.

If Russia begins attacking US-backed Syrian rebels, that will put the US and Russia at odds in Syria. While not quite a Cold War–style proxy conflict, it would still be an added degree of danger and instability in the relationship between the world's two leading nuclear powers, making any international settlement over Syria harder and adding strains over the conflict in Ukraine.

The "good" news is that there are very few US-backed Syrian rebels for Russia to bomb right now. But if the US increases its Syrian rebel training program, perhaps through the quieter CIA effort or perhaps under a subsequent presidential administration, then Syria will have the potential to include Russian forces fighting a US-backed proxy. That is still just a hypothetical, but it's a concerning one.

There are already reports that some of the groups hit by Russia's early strikes were members of, or allied with, US-backed Syrian groups. Given Russia's record of obfuscation in war — it's managed to muddy the waters substantially over its invasion of Ukraine — it may be some time before we have a decisive answer as to whether Russia is deliberately targeting US-backed groups. And it is another question entire whether the Obama administration, which was extremely resistant to even supporting those groups in the first place, will want to stand up for any of its proxies. But this will be an important dimension of the conflict to watch for.