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PutinsMasterPlanforSyria|ForeignPolicy

Putins Master Plan for Syria

The Kremlin isn't withdrawing from the war-torn country, it's hoping to translate its recent
gains into a diplomatic victory.
BY RANDA SLIM

MARCH 18, 2016

After rst surprising the world by entering the fray in Syria last year, Vladimir Putin again shocked observers by
announcing he was partially pulling out. On March 14, the Russian president declared his objectives generally
accomplished and announced the withdrawal of part of his Russian military forces in Syria.

While it is too early to know the scope of the Russian withdrawal, it is safe to assume that it does not amount to an
exit from Syria la the 2011 U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. Putin will keep enough military assets in Syria to redeploy
his forces there when he chooses to do so he said on Thursday that Russia could scale up its presence again
within a few hours, and on Friday his Defense Ministry announced that it was carrying out roughly two dozen
daily air sorties to support the Syrian regimes advance on the eastern city of Palmyra. Russia will also maintain a
naval base in Tartus and the Hmeymim air base, along with hundreds of troops to protect them. Plus, Putin will
keep the Russian S-400 air-defense systems to deter Turkey from shooting down another Russian airplane.
Any talk of this partial withdrawal shifting the tide of the Syrian war in favor of the opposition is wishful
thinking. Moscow went into Syria to prevent the military defeat of Bashar al-Assads regime and to shore him up
in the long term. These two objectives are the primary drivers of Russias Syria policy. Moscow believes these
objectives have been achieved but if it believes the regimes survival is threatened again, it will not hesitate to
redeploy its forces.
But for now, Putin clearly believes that Assads position is secure. Given the military equation on the ground and
the geopolitical realities notably the reluctance of the United States to engage in military action in Syria
Moscow is condent that another threat to regime survival will not materialize anytime soon.

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Putins withdrawal announcement put the well-honed and time-proven spin machine of the Syrian regime to the
test, as Damascus scrambled to make the case it wasnt being abandoned by Russia. But Moscow is clearly
exasperated with Assads inexibility, as it believes the Syrian regime should parlay its recent military gains into
a negotiating advantage at the ongoing peace talks in Geneva. The Syrian government, meanwhile, has shown
little appetite for negotiating about the countrys political future at all.
The troubled relationship between Moscow and Assad is not a recent development. On Nov. 27, 2012, Russian
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Moscow has good working relations with Assad but not the privileged
relation that existed with his father, Hafez al-Assad. Over the past ve years, Assad ignored numerous requests
and recommendations made by Putin to adopt condence-building measures toward the opposition, including
the release of political prisoners.
During the rst four years of the Syrian conict, Moscow did not invite Assad to the Kremlin despite numerous
requests from Damascus. Assad wanted the symbolism of a handshake with the Russian president at a time when
he was persona non grata in international and regional capitals except in Tehran. It was only in October of last
year that the Kremlin nally granted Assads long-held wish of a photo op with Putin. For the Russian president,
this was an opportunity to rearm to his domestic audience that his military intervention came at the request of
the Syrian regime and to press his case to Assad in a face-to-face meeting that the only solution in Syria is a
diplomatic settlement with the participation of all political forces and groups, including armed opposition
groups.
Over the last two months, Moscows growing disenchantment with the regime has been on public display. In a
Feb. 18 rebuke to Assads professed objective of wanting to regain control over all the Syrian territory, Russian
U.N. envoy Vitaly Churkin said Assads remarks do not chime with the diplomatic eorts that Russia is
undertaking.
The gap between Moscow and Damascus only widened after Churkins remarks. After Assad issued a Feb. 22
presidential decree that scheduled parliamentary elections for April, Moscow reminded him that presidential
and parliamentary elections were to be held after the opposition and the government had drawn up a new
constitution. The Syrian foreign ministers recent talk of a red line ahead of the Geneva negotiations was also not
well received in Moscow.

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But none of their squabbling should suggest that Putin is preparing to dump Assad. While Moscow does not want
to be held hostage by the Syrian regime, it has no option but to continue dealing with Assads leadership. Despite
his troubled relationship with Damascus, Putin did not hesitate to send in his air force when its military fortunes
were failing.
So far, Russian diplomacy on Syria has re-established it as a key regional player. Moscows co-sponsorship of the
International Syria Support Group (ISSG), a coalition of 20 countries and organizations designed to facilitate a
diplomatic solution, cements Russias status as an international power to be reckoned with and ensures that
future political arrangements in Syria secure its interests. Moscow and Washingtons collaboration within the
framework of the ISSG cease-re task force produced a cessation of hostilities agreement, which, though not
perfect, has led to a signicant reduction in violence in Syria. It also facilitated humanitarian access to some
besieged areas, even though recent reports indicate that the Syrian government has again stalled on granting
permission for aid deliveries to besieged areas.
Mutual concessions made by Russia and the United States paved the way for this collaboration. At the request of
Russia and China, no references were made to Assad in U.N. Security Council resolution 2254, which oered a
roadmap for a cease-re and a peace process to end the conict in Syria. Russia, meanwhile, dropped its
insistence on excluding Ahrar al-Sham and Jaish al-Islam from the cessation of hostilities and decided to live
with the creative ambiguity that excluded the so-called Islamic State, al-Nusra Front, or other terrorist
organizations designated by the U.N. Security Council.
This collaboration between the United States and Russia is also based on an understanding that unilateral, but
coordinated, actions against the Islamic State are more realistic than joint actions. Despite its claims that it is
ghting terrorists in Syria, Moscow has used the bulk of its repower to target non-Islamic-State-aliated rebel
groups, with the aim of consolidating the Syrian regime areas that are crucial to its survival. Moscow believes that
the Islamic State is more of a threat to U.S. and Western interests than to Russia, notwithstanding the presence of
Chechen and other Russian ghters in Syria.
Going forward, Putins ability to play peacemaker in Syria will be tested in two ways during negotiations. First, he
must reach an accommodation with the United States. Then, he must convince his allies in Damascus and Tehran
to abandon their maximalist positions about the outcome of a political solution to the conict.

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Russia and the United States are still divided over key issues, including the composition and mandate of the
transitional authority, Assads role in the transition, which rebel groups should be dened as terrorists, and the
role of transitional justice in a peace agreement.
Moscow and Washington do seem to have made progress in resolving their disagreements about decentralization
in post-Assad Syria. Having abandoned its early concerns that decentralization could result in the dissolution of
the country, Russia is now open to the idea that a federal model could apply to a future Syria, if the Syrians agreed
to it. On Thursday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that while Moscow wants Syria to remain united, it is
the Syrians themselves who must choose power structure of their country.
The fate of Assad will be Putins key test with Iran. Both Tehran and Moscow will not spare any eort to keep
Assad in power in the absence of a political agreement. Where they still dier is whether a power-sharing
arrangement that guarantees their respective interests in Syria is possible without Assad playing a role in it
though not necessarily leading it. A power-sharing arrangement that includes regime elements but not Assad
might be acceptable to Moscow, but not to Tehran. To date, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is in
charge of Irans Syria policy, still sees Assad as a guarantor that Syria will not become a base for carrying out a
regional anti-Iranian and anti-Hezbollah agenda.
Russia has an old network of formal and informal relations throughout Syrian regime structures and Syrian
society. On the other hand, Irans principal interlocutor in Syria has always been Assad. Since his assumption of
power in 2000, Assad invested more time and eort in strengthening his relationship with Tehran and Hezbollah
than with any other country or party an investment that, in his opinion, has now been vindicated.
Putins decision to withdraw some of his troops from Syria will reinforce Assads view that his bet on Tehran and
Hezbollah was correct. This will make Putin more dependent on Tehrans willingness to assist him in reining in
Assad in order to reach a political solution. It will also make Tehran, not Moscow, the indispensable signatory to
any political agreement in Syria.
SERGEI CHIRIKOV/AFP/Getty Images

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Why Talk of Federalism Wont Help Peace in

Syria
The chaos in Syria is prompting some to look to federalism as a solution. But thats a word
peace negotiators have every reason to avoid.
BY MICHAEL MEYER-RESENDE

MARCH 18, 2016 - 3:09 PM

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It was bound to happen. Within the past few days, a news agency report citing an anonymous U.N. Security
Council diplomat revealed that Russia and unnamed Western powers have been considering a federal
structure for a post-conict Syria.

Federalism is a term that often crops up in the context of peacemaking. International negotiators and warring
parties sometimes see it as the best system for integrating diverse nations, ethnic groups, or combatant parties,
all of whom may have cause to fear control by an overly powerful center.
Just this week, Syrian Kurds announced a plan to transform the northern area under their control into a federal
region, one that would give them considerable autonomy. Meanwhile, Russia may see a federal Syria as a way for
its client, the Assad regime, to at least maintain a grip on the majority-Alawite regions, which include Moscows
strategic assets like the Tartus naval base. To Western powers, federalization may look like the only realistic
scenario for a country that has already fragmented into many regions held by various armed groups. For those
who fear a complete dissolution of Syria, federalism may seem like the best solution they can hope for.
Yet it is all too easy to forget that others may see federalism in starkly dierent terms. Skeptics fear that granting
autonomy to federal units can lead quickly to full-blown secession, hastening dissolution rather than helping put
a country back together. In the case of Syria, both government and opposition negotiators have rejected
federalism, associating it with a break-up of the country. Turkey, too, is likely to do everything to prevent a
federal Syria fearing a repetition of the experience in Iraq, a federal state, whose Kurdish region today largely
governs itself. The mere mention of federalism has already created diplomatic complications.
One need look no further than Libya to see the destructive energies that the talk of federalism can unleash. After
the fall of Muammar al-Qadda, political groupings identied themselves as federalists or anti-federalists, which
they considered to be incompatible positions. These divisions contributed to the outbreak of conict. They have
also made the ongoing constitution-making process unnecessarily dicult, even if on closer inspection neither
side is actually proposing a genuine federal state.

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Ukraine is another case that shows how emotionally charged and politically sensitive the term federalism can
be. Given its size, Ukraine could well be governed as a federal state, but any talk of federalization is anathema to
anybody in Kiev. This is especially true since Russias occupation of Crimea, which had enjoyed the kind of
special autonomy in Ukraine that one would associate with a federal state. The fact that Russia now demands the
federalization of the rest of Ukraine has discredited the idea beyond repair.
There are other reasons why the talk of federalizing Syria meets resistance. Federalizing a country involves
drawing borders on the map to create federal units. Syrians fear that these borders could turn out to be the same
as the ones that the ghting parties have currently carved out. Although this does not appear to be their
intention, the idea of great powers like the U.S. and Russia drawing borders on a map is bound to have negative
connotations in the same region where Great Britain and France drew the Sykes-Picot line in 1916, creating the
new Middle East.
Equally sensitive is the perception that borders may have something to do with carving up territory along ethnic
or religious lines, potentially creating the sort of sectarian state that most Syrians do not want to live in. The U.N.
Security Council resolution of last December, which laid the diplomatic groundwork for the current peace
negotiations in Geneva, explicitly rules out transforming Syria into a sectarian state. But drawing borders could
still easily lead to a new cycle of violence. Groups desperate to avoid becoming minorities in a new federal unit
may ght to defy their fate, while a dominant group may try to cleanse its area of minorities.
The problem with bringing up federalism is that, from the very beginning, it burdens negotiations with a specic
concept of state organization that can call up bad associations and push negotiating parties into blocs of
opponents or supporters. There is actually no need to give a name to whatever solution is being negotiated.
Several past peace processes show how negotiators should proceed. In South Africa and Spain, both countries
with serious tensions between the national level and territorial units, the drafters of their democratic
constitutions avoided giving labels to the territorial arrangements laid out in the texts. John Garang, who
negotiated the peace deal between North and South Sudan in 2005, noted: We have not used any formal word in
the entire [peace agreement] to describe the type of governance that we have negotiated and agreed on. Perhaps
we were guided by the African saying not to name a child before it is born.

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A better starting point for any negotiation is to acknowledge that there are no black-and-white templates for
organizing a countrys territory. There is virtually no state today that is completely centralized; there are, indeed,
as many forms of decentralization as there are states. The December U.N. Security Council resolution foresees the
drafting of a new constitution for Syria that will open the way to overcoming the currently centralized system.
Negotiators can use this process as a basis for asking the parties to elaborate on the specic arrangements they
prefer: How many levels of government should there be? What should be their respective powers? Where should
taxes be collected and distributed? Which level of government is in charge of the police, of schools and roads?
Should all sub-units have the same powers, or could there be asymmetrical arrangements?
A negotiation that focuses on such concrete issues will provide more opportunities for exploring avenues for
compromise than a binary choice between a federal system and some other alternative. Such an approach would
also better t the U.N. Security Council resolution, which indicates that the talks should be led and owned by
the Syrians themselves.
Of course, negotiators will not be able to completely ignore the ethnic or religious aliations of Syrias various
groups when exploring options for decentralizing the state, even if there is a consensus on a non-sectarian future
for the country.
At the same time, any peace agreement will have to be acceptable to wide parts of the population if it is to stick.
The U.N. Security Council resolution species that any new agreement will have to be approved by referendum.
There are, therefore, very practical reasons for avoiding a term that many view as a prelude to dissolution and
which may prompt many Syrians to fear being sorted into ethnic or religious groups. The remedy should be clear.
Lets encourage the parties to focus on the tangible issues, not on labels.
Photo credit: ANDREW COWIE/AFP/Getty Images

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