Konflikten i Syrien

Baku – APA. Russia is ready to help Damascus to close the Syria-Turkey border, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said after meeting with Syrian counterpart Valid Muallim, APA reports quoting TASS.

Lavrov said French President also supports taking of concrete steps in this regard and he hopes that Francois Holland’s initiative will be realized.

“We support it and sure that we’ll put an end to terrorism in Syria through closing the borders”, he stressed.

So Ukrainian experience gives reason for skepticism about Putin’s claim that Russia is intervening in Syria to help Europe with its refugee problem. The politics might well be exactly the opposite. Having found a powerful ally in its quest to end European integration, the European far right has followed Moscow’s lead on the Ukrainian conflict. But the natural subject of Putin’s allies in Europe is immigration. By supporting the Assad regime, Russia helps to produce the refugees that drive European politics rightward.

Whether opposing European Union or Islamicist terrorism, the domestic sources of Russian policy are the same. The problems that Russia faces are inside Russia, and insoluble from beyond Russia. There is no principle of political succession in Russia today, and so Kremlin is telling its people stories about the infallibility and immortality of a leader. In a televisual culture, domestic news is all but absent, and Russia’s presence on the world stage becomes the only story. But the power to change the subject from Ukraine to Syria, as President Putin was trying to do in New York, is not the power to make the story go on forever.

But did President Putin even manage to change the subject? He made some good points about American policy in Iraq. But when he sought the words to define just what he opposed, he gave an eerily accurate description of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. He denounced “zones of anarchy,” which is what Russia created in the Donbas. He decried “belief in one’s exceptionality,” thought it was precisely the idea that Russia as big brother can decide whether Ukraine exists was given as the reason for war. He spoke of the “tragic consequences” of exporting one’s own social model and the dangers of creating “protectorates.” That is indeed the lesson of the Ukrainians killed and displaced by policies known as the “Russian spring” and “New Russia.”