‘Wir schaffen das !’ Those were the words of then German Chancellor Angela Merkel on 31 August 2015. They gave institutional backing to the public wave of support for the Syrian refugees making it to Western Europe. These words became iconic of a totally new European approach to refugees fleeing the Middle East. The policy change lasted for a couple of months, until the European Union (EU) brokered a new agreement with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on 29 November 2015 to keep his frontiers locked.

Ukrainian refugees have not had to wait for four and a half years to see their international rights recognised. That is a good thing. It took the EU (and Switzerland) only one week this time, and the policy of open borders is probably going to hold on longer this time too.

This incredible acceleration in Western, or rather European, humanitarian response has left a lot of Syrians in disarray who had fled the repression of Bashar al-Asad. It’s not that they do not feel solidarity with the Ukrainians, quite the contrary, as they see reproduced elsewhere what has been done to their own towns and neighbourhoods, this time closer to the heart of Europe. The Syrians in exile just don’t understand the difference in treatment; along with many other things, they have difficulty in grasping the way international institutions function. And we are not even talking about the masses of weapons, of all kinds, the Ukrainian government is presently receiving from the West! The FSA used to beg just for anti-aircraft missiles. Now everything is being given to a population in arms which stands side-by-side with an outnumbered Ukrainian military.

It is a fact, Ukraine is not Syria in the eyes of the West, and Putin is no longer viewed as a partner with whom to coordinate internationally. Probably his meddling in the 2017 US elections and his influencing the Brexit vote on 23 June 2016 contributed to this new consciousness. Still it has not always been that way.

Therefore we are faced with two questions: where have we come from in terms of the partnership between Russia and the West, and what has happened between their initial post-soviet idyll and the present cooling down?

Question one is easy to answer: Washington helped save the Russian currency, the Rouble, in 1998, from its financial collapse. This is also the year Moscow integrated into the G8. For the partnership with NATO, one had to wait until the change of political leadership at the Kremlin and the military demonstration of Russia’s steadfastness in Chechnya, to find the right formula. The chamber of consultancy inside NATO’s central office in Brussels was opened in 2002, as a result of the signing of a new agreement between the two sides in Rome on 28 May 2002, date of the birth of the NATO-Russia Council (NRC). In December 2009, NATO asked Russia, then formally led by Dmitri Medvedev, for logistical help in order to resupply its troops in Afghanistan. Under that same President joint military exercises were held under water with submarines on 30 May 2011 and in the skies on 6 June 2011 (the latter dubbed ‘Vigilant Skies 2011’). That is also the period in which not only Resolution 1973 on Libya was passed at the Security Council in New York, authorising limited intervention (a non-fly zone in practice - on 17 March, a month after the start of the Uprising on 15 February) in order to prevent mass civilian casualties (Both Russia and Germany (plus China) inside the Security Council abstained from the vote).  That Resolution was a way to put into practice the Responsibility to Protect principle, adopted unanimously in 2005 at the UN general assembly (‘World Summit’), and it galvanised the protest in Syria; the following day the population of Dar’a came out en masse. 

But it was also during the tenure of Medvedev that no one set to the vote any Resolution on Syria at the UN Security Council, for the first seven months of the dramatic events unfolding in the country. Not the US, but not even France or Great Britain. These last two permanent members were the drafters of the first Resolution, vetoed on 4 October 2011. It wasn’t forged on the principles of the Responsibility to Protect anyway. In that sense it was milder than the one accepted on Libya.

In the case of the latest Russian aggression against Ukraine, it took the US less then 48 hours to present a resolution at the Security Council in New York, on 25 February 2022. There is no comparison possible! So what happened in the meantime?

It is not wrong to say that Russia has turned on its western tutors. Financially the recent connection is quite simple to illustrate, especially since (West) Germany decided already in the 1950s to build peace through gas trade with Moscow (a principle that was further anchored at the end of the 90s under the SPD government of then Chancellor Gerard Schröder, who decided to phase out the country’s nuclear plants roughly by 2022). 

As a report by the Marschall Center put it in 2008, in terms of world gas reserves, Russia holds the same leverage as Saudia Arabia in the oil field. Thus Europe, not only its Western part, has financed Putin’s economic recovery and expansion since the year 2000. And Vladimir Putin put a fair share of that money into his army. As we know, this flow of hard currency goes on to the present day, as the Ukrainians denounce regularly; and the Russian military, which has been restructured thanks to this partnership, is now being turned against a people that already, back in 2014, wanted European membership.

The strong energy bind with Russia has been central to the European debate about any new sanctions on Russia, since the Ukraine invasion began.

But what about the growth of Russia’s political and military outreach on the world scene, when did that happen? Ultimately, this is the main consequence of the United States’ defeat in Iraq and the western failures in Afghanistan (ultimately illustrated with last summer’s shameful withdrawal). As a result, Washington did not want to commit to any new military campaign in the region involving ground forces (‘boots on the ground’). This was said repeatedly by then US President Barack Obama, most notably at West Point on 28 May 2014, just days before the lightening expansion of ISIS in Iraq. 

Still, the global slump of 2007-2008 rocked badly the economic and institutional order of a great number of countries in the Near East. Huge financial investments evaporated where economies had been massively privatised, pushing decades’ old contradictions rapidly to the surface. Someone else had to police the void that was materialising if the US was not going to do the job.

For each country a solution was going to be tailored, the boundaries needed to hold. In the case of Iraq, the North Americans chose Iran as their best substitute. No one better than Nouri al-Maliki illustrates this, he who was introduced to power by the West and later moved on to become Teheran’s henchman.

Syria quickly became a big problem for Obama in 2011. The population had begun a peaceful uprising inspired by fellow Arab citizens of other countries (‘The Arab Spring’ spreading). However, in the case of Bashar al-Asad’s removal from power, Israel would claim a lot. Tel Aviv would no longer tolerate a regime in Damascus that could seriously threaten or harm it. 

Still, Iran moved in swiftly to salvage what could still be of the Syrian Ba’th’s powerhouse. Not only had it invested financially in the country since 2006, but it needed Syria as a platform to operate freely (militarily) in Lebanon, which has an important shi’ite community, and from there, further abroad. Obama knew this and decided not to oppose the Iranian takeover of central Damascus at the end of July 2012. Washington even promoted the Iranians in their regional outreach by signing the Nuclear deal (JCPOA) in Vienna on 14 July 2015. This was a slap in the face for then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who allied with Putin in 2017 to kick the Democrats out of the White House.

Nevertheless, Iran could not handle Syria alone, something that became obvious to everyone in the late summer of 2015 when Russia decisively came to al-Asad’s aid. Internally and on the front lines, the regime was rapidly losing out, controlling just around 20% of the country back then, compared with present day estimates of around 65% of the country’s territory. Moscow had long wanted to return to the front stage in Syria, but ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a huge divide had appeared between the previous allies.

Fortunately, Washington wasn’t, in principle, for excluding Russia from the future of the country, although Moscow and Damascus had mainly ties from the past, given that the policies of economic reform put forward by Bashshar al-Asad since the start of the century were Western oriented. The state of decay of the relations between the two old partners of the cold war period was perfectly illustrated by a documentary on RTR Russian TV aired on 4 July 2012, which showed the Tartus naval facility’s state of abandon.

Obama recognised a key role to Putin first on 30 June 2012, here in this city, when an initial Geneva memorandum on Syria was signed by the Action Group for Syria. This happened against the backdrop of dramatic news of the Russians preparing to retrieve their citizens and military advisors from Syria. A fleet had been organised with that aim only 12 days earlier. On Saturday 28 July, Vice-Admiral Viktor Chirkov told Echo Moscow radio that, if the Russian President were to decide so, he would order the evacuation of the naval installation in Tartus, eyeing the possibility of an attack by the FSA. The uncertainty on the part of the Russians of what their destiny might be in Syria went on until December 2012 and even January 2013 when they sent two airplanes to Beirut to evacuate citizens who wanted to leave Syria. It was too dangerous to land in Damascus itself. Until 6 March 2015, Russia voted in favour of Resolution 2209 against the use of Chlorine as a weapon of war in Syria.

But the good news for Putin was that the US went further than that: in September 2013 Russia was awarded unexpectedly new credibility and a new role, although it had been unable to control its Syrian associate (the regime) or have it sit down at a negotiating table with the opposition. This would happen only months later, at the start of 2014, and come to be known as the Geneva II Syria talks. Nevertheless, the world was told that Moscow had found the solution to the Syrian Chemical weapons issue, forgetting to mention that the USSR itself had created the problem back in the 1970s. 

In the first days of September 2013, someone must have thought it was better not to bomb the regime to pieces, and it was decided that Russia was a credible candidate for formulating such an idea in public. In exchange, Damascus promised essentially it would not do such bad things anymore.

Surprisingly, no one asked what the rationale was to prefer this as an option, nor why anyone should believe or even listen to Moscow, which didn’t have any ‘boots on the ground’: considering the specific situation of that time, when Obama’s red line had bluntly been disregarded.

It was only at the end of September 2015 that Russia broke the US playbook by intervening to save al-Asad, while everyone else was focusing first and foremost on fighting ISIS. The initial American moves to obstruct the Russians carrying out their plans were futile, and already less than a month later, on 23 October, both sides were back to the Conference room. Not even sanctions were introduced; it was time for business with no Syrian representatives invited. These talks would prepare (through the 22 February 2016 Munich Agreement) the way to the present day division of Syria.

This is how Putin got his self-assurance on the international stage.

And for all those years, one could hear experts and commentators already speaking of a new Cold War set up, and an impossible divide in the Security Council. Most recently, with her 2021 text, the retired international Prosecutor Carla del Ponte wrote that it was all paralysis back then! So, how can it be that there was still any room for sanctions against Russia at the end of February 2022, if the Syrian issue had already divided the world in two opposing camps?

Therefore, rather than speaking of any new kind of Cold War, one should identify in terms of present US anger about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, like the feelings of an old man being betrayed by a partner who was promoted to associate 20 years earlier. It is true that NATO has expanded, but was that not a fair price Russia had to pay for the advantages it gained from the exclusive venue it was offered, and of which old Soviet dignitaries could only have dreamt?

In the end the war in Ukraine is a war fought on the backdrop of western actors’ miscalculations. In a way it is a war of the West against itself, where we are paying both opposing sides in the trenches. Simply, the supporters of a new kind of Brezhnev order had been waiting in the shadow and we were the ones who invited them in.

Photo credit: Svenn Sivertssen/Flickr