The Russia-China Axis. Douglas E. Schoen
He continues to insist, for instance, that the chemical-weapons attack in August 2013 may not have been the work of Assad. He said: “We talk all the time about the responsibility of the Assad regime if it turns out that they did it, but nobody is asking about the responsibility of the rebels if they did it. We have all the reasons to believe it was a clever provocation.”79
Neither the U.S. nor the UK and France have expressed the slightest doubt that Assad perpetrated the attack. Russia’s ties to Syria make it difficult to take Moscow’s skepticism seriously. Putin has brilliantly used the crisis to paint himself as international peacekeeper. He also tapped into American war exhaustion. “At the time we tried to talk to the UK prime minister about our doubts on Iraq, but they didn’t listen, and look at the result,” he said. “Every day dozens of people die. Do you understand? Every day. What’s the result?”80
Russia is a longtime supplier of weapons to Syria, and throughout the civil war, Moscow sold Assad enough arms, both offensive and defensive, to help the dictator stay in power. The Russians’ arming of Assad not only took place at the same time they were publically calling for peace talks, but it also flew in the face of their own statements warning the West not to arm the rebels. “In our point of view, it [arming the Syrian opposition] is a violation of international law,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in March 2013.81 By Russian thinking, international law has nothing to say about arming the Syrian regime. The significance of Russian weapons in Syria has implications far beyond Syria’s borders; because the Russian shipments may also be shared with Assad’s terrorist ally, Hezbollah, they also have the potential to cause widespread havoc in the region. “If Hezbollah and Iran are supporting Syria and propping the [Assad] regime up, then why shouldn’t it transfer those weapons to Hezbollah?” asked senior Israeli defense official Amos Gilad. “You don’t even have to be an intelligence expert, it makes sense that they will. If Hezbollah can put its hands on them, it will.”82
Russian (and Chinese) support for Assad is perhaps the most blatant example of the double game that Moscow and Beijing have played for years. In public, they call for peace conventions and author UN resolutions; behind the scenes, they back the Syrian regime to the hilt. Russia and China have stood with Syria for years, undermining the efforts of international institutions to mediate the conflict and bring an end to the bloodshed.
The Syrian saga has moved quickly since the chemical-weapons attack of August 2013, but all along, Russia and China have remained unswerving in their efforts to protect an important ally. By July of 2012, the two nations had blocked three UN resolutions since the uprising against Assad began. Among these were a British-sponsored initiative that would have placed sanctions on the Syrian government for failing to go through with a peace plan, including a cease-fire and demands that the Syrian government stop using heavy weapons against the opposition. The British plan also suggested the basis for a political transition. The Russians blocked a Security Council fact-finding trip to Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon to deal with the refugee crisis. Moscow said the trip was beyond the Security Council’s mandate.
“I don’t believe Syria would use chemical weapons,” Lavrov said in February 2013. “It would be a political suicide for the government if it does.”83 Six months later, Assad proved Lavrov wrong.
The Russians did all they could in the immediate aftermath of the attack to help Syria. They made only the most grudging concessions: They issued a public statement urging the Assad government to cooperate with UN investigators, while in the same breath they alleged that the Syrian opposition, not Assad, was behind the attack. “It is now up to the opposition, which should guarantee safe access for the mission to the alleged place of the incident,” said the statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry.84 Lukashevich also fingered the opposition for the attack, saying, “This criminal act had an openly provocative character.” As evidence, he pointed to a YouTube video about the chemical attacks, time-stamped hours before they began in Syria. “So the talk here is about a previously planned action,” he concluded.85
Lukashevich overlooked something embarrassingly obvious: YouTube, run out of California, time-stamps all its videos, regardless of the time zone where they originate, by U.S. West Coast time, which is 10 hours behind Damascus.86
Even after the YouTube confusion had been explained, Foreign Minister Lavrov hammered away at the same theme. “There is information that videos were posted on the Internet hours before the purported attack, and other reasons to doubt the rebel narrative,” he said days later. “Those involved with the incident wanted to sabotage the upcoming Geneva peace talks. Maybe that was the motivation of those who created this story. The opposition obviously does not want to negotiate peacefully.”87
Lavrov was right about one thing: After the chemical attack, any hope for a Geneva peace conference was gone. But even Russian advocacy for the peace conference had amounted to less than met the eye. One reason they felt comfortable organizing the conference was that they knew it would fail, in no small part because they had insisted on Iran’s participation. “One must not exclude a country like Iran from this process because of geopolitical preferences,” Lavrov said. “It is a very important external player.”88 All the while, Russia maintained its assistance to Assad.
Lavrov’s advocacy for the peace conference came almost simultaneously with news that the Russian navy was bulking up its military and naval presence in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, sending more than a dozen warships to patrol waters near Tartus, home to Russia’s only naval base in the Mediterranean. Analysts called the buildup one of Russia’s “largest sustained naval deployments since the Cold War.”89 Observers in the U.S. and Europe saw the Russian deployment as less about defending Syria and Assad per se—though it would certainly help do that—and more about warning the West, and Israel, not to make another Libya out of the Syrian conflict.
The naval show of force wasn’t only about ships. At the same time, the Russians announced that they would proceed with sales of advanced anti-ship cruise missiles, known as Yakhonts, to the Syrians. Russia had provided an earlier version of the missiles years before, but the new models are equipped with state-of-the-art radar systems. The updated Yakhonts would allow Assad’s military to “deter foreign forces looking to supply the opposition from the sea, or from undertaking a more active role if a no-fly zone or shipping embargo were to be declared at some point,” said Nick Brown of Jane’s International Defense Review. “It’s a real ship killer.”90
If that weren’t bad enough, it became clear in May 2013 that the Russians would almost certainly go ahead with the delivery to Syria of the highly advanced S-300 surface-to-air defense system. Thanks to Russian construction, technology, and know-how, Syrian air defenses were already highly advanced, but the new system could shoot down guided missiles and present a formidable, perhaps prohibitive, obstacle to warplanes trying to enter Syrian airspace. The U.S. persuaded Moscow to back off selling the S-300 to Iran—for which the Iranians eventually sued Moscow—but the Americans could not convince Russia to do the same regarding Syria.91
The issue of Syrian air defense bears on another threat: the likelihood that the Assad regime is transferring Russian arms, including the Yakhont missiles, to Hezbollah in Lebanon—a transfer that Israel, for one, regards as a fact. In late April 2013, Russian Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov met in Beirut with Hezbollah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah. Sources close to the meeting said that it concerned “the role of Russia in protecting the forces that are close to it” as well as the “matching ideological, economic, geostrategic, and security-related interests of Moscow and local forces” in the region.92
For Israel, the meeting was dispositive. The Israelis reportedly conducted airstrikes inside Syria in early 2013 targeting suspected weapons shipments to the terrorist group.93 But it was later revealed that the Israelis had never entered Syrian airspace; they had instead used a tactical maneuver called “lofting” to launch bombs across the border to the target about 10 miles inside Syria.94 If the Israelis were unwilling to challenge the regime’s existing air defenses, imagine the difficulties of doing so when Damascus is able to deploy the S-300 system. Israeli incursions into Syrian airspace may become prohibitive—and