Reports of Russian troops in Syria

In recent days, there have been several reports of Russian troops and vehicles fighting in Syria alongside Assad.

-Ynet says that a Russian expeditionary force has set up a forward operating base near Damascus, and thousands of military personnel and fighter jets are expected to begin showing up in the coming months.

Russia's also apparently reached an agreement with Iran to keep Assad in power as a buffer to prevent ISIS from spreading further east.

-State media cited by the Telegraph also supposedly shows Russian troops and vehicles already fighting rebels in Latakia. Other social media posts also seem to show Russian drones and aircraft photographed over Syria.



-Earlier in August, Bosphorus Naval News posted pictures of what seemed to be a Russian ship carrying military vehicles heading through Istanbul.

Spoiler

Of course, Russia has been supporting the Assad regime for a long time; that's not news. There have also always been wild-eyed reports about Russian invasions of Syria because the whole region is a clusterfuck of misinformation. But these reports are credible enough that the White House is "monitoring" them.


Discuss.

 

[Dudeofteenage]

>TFW Vladimir Putin is doing more to stop ISIS from spreading than Obama is.

Yes, military intervention is definitely the solution to ISIS, the bigger, the better

 

[Operator Kyoko Sakura]

Yes, military intervention is definitely the solution to ISIS, the bigger, the better

I agree with that.

Plus Russian Army is far more professional than the Syrian Army and has slightly better equipment.

Can't stand Putin, but gotta give him credit from turning the Russian Army from a joke to a force to be reckoned with.

 

[Dudeofteenage]

I agree with that.

Plus Russian Army is far more professional than the Syrian Army and has slightly better equipment.

Can't stand Putin, but gotta give him credit from turning the Russian Army from a joke to a force to be reckoned with.

90% of the Russian army is rubbish, not just because it's made up of conscripts but because the conscripts are the ones who are unable to escape conscription. In the words of Mark Galeotti they are "only occasionally good for third-line duties". The remaining 10% is as good as any European or North American force, and that's the group that tends to see action in conflicts like Georgia or Ukraine or (in the unlikely event) Syria. Russia hasn't fought a large-scale war since the 1980s, so if they did, the army's low overall quality might tell.

Having said that if there was ever a scenario where Russia did have to fight a major war, you'd probably see very high levels of volunteerism among the people who'd previously evaded conscription.

Although I have to say I'm not sure that the army's quality really has improved drastically under Putin. In some areas, such as combat helicopters (where the USSR used to be a world leader in both design and tactics) it's unambiguously declined. Of course Putin likes to declare he's done so, and he's certainly used the army more than Yeltsin did so he's had more opportunities to show what quality exists, but actually improved it? Doubtful.

And for the record I was being sarcastic about the idea that there is a military solution to ISIS

 

[LazarusOwenhart]

(When I say, us, we or our I'm referring to the European Union) I agree that Russia pushing ISIS back is a good thing but we need to remember the larger political situation here, and why Russia is acting in the first place. Assad is a dictator, and an evil one at that. The west generally want to see him unseated but Russia don't because he's a good little patsy and they have a strong base in the middle east as long as Syria is on side. Assuming Russia drive ISIS out of Syria they aren't going to continue a protracted ground war across the border with them, they'll just harden the border and then turn on the Syrian rebels who are being supported by us. That puts the west slap in the middle of a proxy war with Russia, something that will only serve to escalate tensions. Remember as well that the support we provide is generally airstrikes which means we have to either withdraw that support OR our air forces are potentially DIRECTLY engaging Russian ground forces which will be seen as an act of war. Total War with Russia is a catastrophic idea so we'd withdraw our support and leave the rebels on their own. Russia then does one of two things, either they re-install Assad, he enacts a brutal crackdown and kills a lot of innocent people and creates a totalitarian state allied with Russia OR Putin decides enough bullshit and Syria becomes a part of Putin's new U.S.S.R.

 

[AN/ALR56]

NATO failed to see the deployment of russian troops beforehand,they won't act at all,just like Ukraine.
Also assad might be aasshole,but democracy on failed states are bullshit.
They need a strong leader to crush the internal opposition.
Until the situation is stable and they have a decent infrastructure,democracy will be a dream.

 

[Dudeofteenage]

NATO failed to see the deployment of russian troops beforehand,they won't act at all,just like Ukraine.
Also assad might be aasshole,but democracy on failed states are bullshit.
They need a strong leader to crush the internal opposition.
Until the situation is stable and they have a decent infrastructure,democracy will be a dream.

Violence - the cause, and solution, of all the third world's problems!

 

[LazarusOwenhart]

Violence - the cause, and solution, of all the third world's problems!

Acting like armed conflict is something that a civilized society will completely do away with is naive. We will ALWAYS have conflict, there will always be wars, revolutions and uprisings. All 'utopias' rely on a key fact, everyone in them believes the same thing and humanity isn't like that. Conflicts merely expand to the scope of the world they inhabit. 300 years ago Europe was a pack of bickering, warring nations rife with revolution and territorial wars. So was Asia, so was America. Today we have relative peace in these countries but our conflicts have expanded, no we fight on a global stage. A millenia from now, who knows, Earth may be peaceful, but one of our colonies somewhere else in the Solar system may be fighting to secede from Earth's governance. Anyway, sometimes violence is the answer, simple as that.

 

[AN/ALR56]

Violence - the cause, and solution, of all the third world's problems!

The entire Syria clusterfuck is Europe and the us's failure to act back in 2011.
Now either you let Russia handle the situation or you send your troops there,tiny drones and expensive stealth planes aren't going to do shit.

 

[Dudeofteenage]

The entire Syria clusterfuck is Europe and the us's failure to act back in 2011.
Now either you let Russia handle the situation or you send your troops there,tiny drones and expensive stealth planes aren't going to do shit.

So what was the solution back in 2011 that nobody took? Massive military intervention to prop up the Assad regime?

Acting like armed conflict is something that a civilized society will completely do away with is naive.

Did I say that?

 

[WachtAmWeb]

So what was the solution back in 2011 that nobody took? Massive military intervention to prop up the Assad regime?

I maintain that a well-managed NATO and Arab air and naval intervention in July 2012 would have smashed Assad in a week and paved the way for real change in Syria. Of course there was no political or military will for that in the West, so all we got was a Chamberlain-esque "red line" on chemical weapons that we were too pussy to enforce. I'm not surprised in the least that Putin thinks he can get away with all the shit he's been pulling lately, we in the West are even less willing to stand up and voice our opposition than we were in 1938/9 against another small man with big and dangerous ideas.

 

[Tookie]

I don't think Russia will commit enough resources to Syria to do much more than insure a stalemate. Russia's economy is still in bad shape and they have bled a lot more resources in Ukraine than they like to let on, getting bogged down in Syria may at the very least distract them and sap their ability to cause more trouble in eastern Europe.

 

[Too Many Crooks]

The Russian army isn't there to fight ISIS. It's there acting in its own self-interest because the Kremlin wants to keep its alliance with Assad.

 

[Dudeofteenage]

I maintain that a well-managed NATO and Arab air and naval intervention in July 2012 would have smashed Assad in a week and paved the way for real change in Syria

Really? If this would have worked in 2012, why couldn't it work now? Assad's forces are far weaker now than they were in 2012.

 

[DNJACK]

Neither RUssia nor the US cares about ISIS. It has always been about Assad. Nobody remembers the US alegations of chemicals attacks on civilian, when they were to level Damascus, and then Russia made it clear that they would sunk their destroyer if they tried ?

It's the same thing. The US uses Isis as a pretext to get involved in the region. Russia decides to do the same.

 

[LazarusOwenhart]

Really? If this would have worked in 2012, why couldn't it work now? Assad's forces are far weaker now than they were in 2012.

Yes but they now have Russian backing meaning that any NATO action may be directly targeting Russian troops.

 

[DuskEngine]

Really? If this would have worked in 2012, why couldn't it work now? Assad's forces are far weaker now than they were in 2012.

The opposition is also a lot more fractured, and extremist groups have gained more ground. The FSA has lost tons of fighters to al-Nusra and ISIS.

Assad would be easier to topple now than he was in 2012, yes. But I'd argue that whatever government would replace his today would be worse than the one the Syrians would have had in 2012.

Yes but they now have Russian backing meaning that any NATO action may be directly targeting Russian troops.

I think that is why Assad and the US-led coalition have avoided specifically targeting each other so far. That could possibly change, but I'm not sure.

 

[seagull]

Russian soldiers have been posting geo-tagged selfies, giving us a little bit of a better idea where they are.

From the BBC:

What can we tell from these photos? Well, many are geo-tagged - they include location information. Almost all, Leviev says, were taken in or near the Russian naval installation at Tartus. Nothing so far, then, to contradict Moscow's officially stated policy.

But some of the photos are tagged with locations in Syria's huge Homs province, which includes areas which have seen intense fighting. Additionally, the WIU researchers looked at a YouTube video from August apparently showing fighting to the north of Latakia, Syria's main port city which lies to the north of Tartus. They also say they found footage of drones flying in Syrian airspace. Russian words are audible on the battle footage.

"The video we've analyzed prove that it was a Russian armoured personnel carrier [that was involved in the fighting], supplied from a Russian military unit (not straight from the factory) and had a Russian-speaking crew," Leviev told BBC Trending.

But does that actually mean these are Russian soldiers fighting? Actually, not quite. Leviev urges caution. These pictures and videos "wouldn't be enough to conclusively say the crew consists of active Russian servicemen," he says. "They could be Russian mercenaries sent to Syria, among other things. We believe there is not 100% proof that Russian servicemen are taking part in combat operations in Syria.

More here: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-34188569

 

[Dudeofteenage]

The opposition is also a lot more fractured, and extremist groups have gained more ground. The FSA has lost tons of fighters to al-Nusra and ISIS.

Assad would be easier to topple now than he was in 2012, yes. But I'd argue that whatever government would replace his today would be worse than the one the Syrians would have had in 2012.

True, but the nucleus of what would become ISIS existed in 2012 - if the west had eliminated Assad's forces decisively surely it's equally likely ISIS would just have consolidated faster - or that it would have popped up at the same time but would have been confronting the pro-western government that would ideally have replaced Assad?

I suppose you could argue that a 2012 air campaign would have deposed Assad, that he would have been relatively painlessly replaced by a pro-western government, that there'd have been no repercussions against Baathist minorities like the Alawites, and that ISIS' rise in 2013 would have been relatively painlessly seen off by a united post-Assadist government. But there are a lot of extremely debatable assumptions at work there, and only one of them needs to be wrong for this whole military-intervention-ideal-scenario to fall apart.

This idea that there was a missed opportunity to solve all Syria's problems with a few well placed bombs seems much less likely to be a retroactively conjured component of an attempt to criticise the West's policies than a response to an analysis of the way things turned out. If you're a neo-con you have to believe that military intervention pays dividends and Obama was stupid not to go straight to it, so you create these tenuous scenarios where decisive aggression solves multiple complex problems at once.

Yes but they now have Russian backing meaning that any NATO action may be directly targeting Russian troops.

Fantasies about decisive Putinist intervention in Syria aside, I doubt Russian troops are going to be so omnipresent that it'll be impossible to take military action against Assad without hitting them.

 

[WachtAmWeb]

Really? If this would have worked in 2012, why couldn't it work now? Assad's forces are far weaker now than they were in 2012.

True, but the nucleus of what would become ISIS existed in 2012 - if the west had eliminated Assad's forces decisively surely it's equally likely ISIS would just have consolidated faster - or that it would have popped up at the same time but would have been confronting the pro-western government that would ideally have replaced Assad?

I suppose you could argue that a 2012 air campaign would have deposed Assad, that he would have been relatively painlessly replaced by a pro-western government, that there'd have been no repercussions against Baathist minorities like the Alawites, and that ISIS' rise in 2013 would have been relatively painlessly seen off by a united post-Assadist government. But there are a lot of extremely debatable assumptions at work there, and only one of them needs to be wrong for this whole military-intervention-ideal-scenario to fall apart.

This idea that there was a missed opportunity to solve all Syria's problems with a few well placed bombs seems much less likely to be a retroactively conjured component of an attempt to criticise the West's policies than a response to an analysis of the way things turned out.

Of course, this is counterfactual and there are loads of ways you could find flaws in it (as you quite rightly have) - the point of my post was really that the West has to recognise that however tenuous the opportunities of 2012 were, and however many problems could have arisen after that scenario, it still could have steered events far away from where they are now. No-one I've heard talking about the situation in Syria has admitted that they fucked up by letting it get this bad, and more importantly, campaigners don't seem to have picked up on that. Considering how much of a hammering Obama got from his opponents over Benghazi and how the right is using the abject failure of the American military's attempts to raise a pro-democracy Rebel army in Syria, I would have though there would be good grounds to hammer him, Hollande, Cameron and Erdogan about pussying out.

 

[LazarusOwenhart]

Fantasies about decisive Putinist intervention in Syria aside, I doubt Russian troops are going to be so omnipresent that it'll be impossible to take military action against Assad without hitting them.

I wouldn't call it a fantasy. Russian ground troops are operating in Homs Province at the moment. There is irrefutable evidence of this. It's only going to take one little bit of bad intelligence for a drone strike to take out a Russian convoy. This would be a bad thing. Also, they are ALLIED with Assad, therefore attacking Assad is still warfare by proxy against Putin's regime. You really seem to have no idea exactly how complicated even one Russian death at the hands of a NATO state would make the worldwide political situation.