PUTIN'S NEXT MOVE

There is no shortage of experts predicting what Putin may do if Zelensky fires his Western long-range ATACMS (army tactical missile systems) deep into Russia.  On Syria’s borders are both US military bases and Russian including Putin’s strategically important naval base at Tartus on the Mediterranean.  But opinions how Russia might respond to a major Israeli attack on Iran, with US back-up, are notable by their absence.  Instead, we hear repeated, imprecise warnings of a ‘wider war in the Middle East’.  How wide though?
   
From the inception of the Syrian civil war in March 2011, like Iran, Russia provided Assad with military aid.    And from late 2011 Iran sent Revolutionary Guard Forces (IRCG) to join the Hezbollah militias propping up Assad’s collapsing regime.   In July 2015 General Qasem Soleimani, later assassinated by Israel, visited Moscow to coordinate military tactics.  Two months later Russia intervened decisively with its air-force and troops including Wagner Group irregulars.  The resultant bombing and slaughter set a pattern for future Russian war crimes. 

“A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilised”, the words of President Obama in August 2012.  Almost a year to the day President Assad used sarin gas on the population of Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, killing some 1,400.  No US military intervention against the Syrian regime followed.  For a variety of reasons, not least the US’ previous debacles in Somalia and Iraq, the red line had been erased.  In 2014, a US-led coalition did act but in an air campaign against ISIS and the Al-Nusra Front in Syria.  An opportunity for Putin had opened up.  In 2015, Russian firepower was turned indiscriminately on the Free Syrian Army fighting Assad whose murderous regime was helped cling onto power.  Syria fell apart, hundreds of thousands died, 6.7 million left the country mainly to Turkey and Lebanon, and 6.8 were internally displaced.  Syria became a haven for militias and terrorist groups. 

Fast forward to today.  It is almost a year since Iran’s Deputy Defence Minister, Brigadier General Mahdi Farah, announced the forthcoming delivery of 24 Russian Sukhoi fighter jets and Russia is also believed to be in receipt of some 200 Iranian surface-to-surface short range (75 kms) battlefield missiles and to be supported in manufacturing drones for its war in Ukraine.  How Russia would respond to a major Israeli attack on Iran, with or without US support, remains speculation.  But Putin’s past record offers some clues. 

Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People: How the KGB took back Russia and then took on the West (William Collins 2020) presents Putin as an adept practitioner of the dissimulation, oppression and criminality of the Russian intelligence services both internally and externally.  He, and they, foresaw the collapse of Soviet communism, were determined to retain power in any new dispensation, and moved KGB funds into overseas accounts, notably through the ‘Londongrad laundromat’. 
   
In the 1990s, Putin deployed his training in deception as a KGB lieutenant colonel, his spy’s divided personality, to great effect, hiding ruthless ambition, saying what his listeners wanted to hear, and for several years took in both Angela Merkel and Tony Blair.  He had risen from a modest KGB post in Dresden organising the smuggling of Western embargoed technology into Russia.  Then, via the mayor’s office in St. Petersburg (deputy mayor in 1994), he became a trusted advisor to President Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999).    The next task was to remove Yeltsin and his entourage and become President, then to use of the organs of state to bring the primary beneficiaries of Western enforced privatisation, the oligarchs, to heel, and concentrate power in his own hands.  State capture, taking over functioning institutions, required and allowed the gradual accumulation of power, national wealth plundered by selected associates, predominantly FSB, successor to the KGB.  Belton tracks the process in extraordinary detail.
  
Until it was too late few Western politicians seemed alarmed that Putin was creating a mafia-style autocracy, opponents assassinated or wasting away in Siberian gulags and prisons, punished for disloyalty.  Meanwhile huge sums of money that could be used as future FSB and GRU (military intelligence) obschak, slush fund for subverting democracy, was flowing into London and offshore banks.  Bankers, lawyers and reputation managers in London took their fees, oligarchs bought up prime property driving up prices, and FSB enemies were assassinated. 
  
But like any good spy Putin needed a good cover story.  It was sitting there waiting for him amongst Russia’s economic ruins, the wreckage of the loss of the Soviet Union, and America’s growing influence in Georgia and Ukraine.  He, Putin, the story ran, had taken up the Presidency to restore the fatherland and return Russia to its imperial glory.  Belton suggests that Putin picked up this Tsarist-sounding nationalism in the 1990s from Paris-based aristocratic White Russians who had fled the Bolshevik Revolution and whom he had met and liked.  Putin’s adoption of the Russian Orthodoxy that White Russians held dear, as an ideological substitute for communism, fits this analysis.
  
I visited Moscow in 1990 and met with Gorbachev’s religious advisers.  They were bewailing the loss of ‘communist morality’.  Would Christianity take its place, they asked me?  Putin, several years later, seems to have had a similar idea alleging that he’d been secretly baptised by his mother.   Archbishop Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, most likely a former KGB asset - undiplomatically warned by Pope Francis not to become “Putin’s altar boy”- was a natural ally.  Army officers were even sent to the Russian Orthodox monastery of St. Panteleimon on Mount Athos for religious retreats.  Kirill proclaimed Ukraine a Holy War. 

Putin shares space satellite programmes with Iran, contempt for ‘Western decadence’, rejection of all things LGBTQ+, and, of course, the rhetoric and reality of hatred of the USA.  Beyond the distorted world of Putin’s propaganda Russia as Christian bulwark against Western secularism seems bizarre.   After Afghanistan, Russia’s brutal conflict in Chechnya involving Sunni jihadists, the terrible 2004 Beslan school slaughter of young children and the horrors of ISIS, and with American bases in most Sunni States, it’s not surprising Russia might be more comfortable with the geopolitics of Iran, a Shi’a-led State.
 
What then is Putin’s next move in the Middle East?  Russia received a Hamas delegation in Moscow in 2023.  It has de facto abandoned its former balanced position on the Palestine-Israel conflict.  But this does not amount to the Kremlin committing Russian military forces to support Iran against Israel.  The IRCG are competing with the needs of Russian forces in Ukraine.  Iran even denies that the awaited delivery of Russian Sukhoi fighters is imminent.
    
Putin will continue attempting to use disinformation and cyber-attacks to disrupt UK society as punishment, not for support of Israel, but for Britain’s outspoken role in Europe championing Ukraine.  His immediate task is getting Trump elected and US support for Ukraine curtailed, the decisive victory this would give Russia in the Ukraine war, putting NATO in jeopardy.  Ukraine takes, by far, priority over Palestinians, Lebanese and Iranians.  One thing is sure: Putin will increase his cyber efforts to influence the November US presidential elections and put his friend, Donald Trump, in the White House again.

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See TheArticle  09/10.2024