Russian President Vladimir Putin is “stuck” in Syria trying to prop up a regime that can’t afford to rebuild a country wracked by civil war, according to a top White House official.
“The Russians are stuck there at the moment,” John Bolton, President Trump’s national security adviser, told Reuters. “And I don’t think they want to be stuck there.”
Recommended Stories
Russia rescued Syrian dictator Bashar Assad from a potential overthrow by intervening in 2015, in partnership with Iranian ground forces, to provide crucial air support to the regime. That led to a stalemate in which Assad is militarily secure, within the limits of his power, but can’t reclaim some of the most valuable territory in the country without confronting U.S.-backed forces. Likewise, the United States isn’t targeting the regime directly, but Western powers have declined to provide the foreign aid necessary to rebuild territory under Assad’s power.
“I think their frenetic diplomatic activity in Europe indicates that they’d like to find somebody else, for example, to bear the cost of reconstructing Syria — which they may or may not succeed in doing,” Bolton said.
U.S. officials regard foreign aid — or the lack of it — as a means of achieving through soft power what the rebel fighters could not: Assad’s departure from power.
“It’s just reality: Syria — by World Bank estimates, [it will require] more than $200 billion to reconstruct Syria,” Brett McGurk, the U.S. official overseeing counter-Islamic State operations in the region, told reporters at the State Department in 2017. “It’s probably many multiples of that. And the international community is not going to come to the aid of Syria until there is a credible political horizon that can lead to a credible political transition in Syria. That is the reality.”
Putin hopes that European leaders will provide financial support to Assad in order to mitigate a refugee crisis in the region. “We must reinforce the humanitarian dimension of the Syrian conflict, and by that I mean boost humanitarian assistance to the Syrian population, and help the regions where refugees living abroad can return to,” he said Saturday during a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “This is potentially a huge burden for Europe.”
That was a pointed warning for Merkel, whose popularity took a blow within Germany and the European Union more broadly after she agreed to allow nearly a million Syrian refugees into the country in 2015. But she has resisted a turn to support for Assad.
“What we see at the moment, the terrible events in Syria, the fight of a regime not against terrorists, but against its own people, the killing of children, the destruction of hospitals, all this is a massacre which has to be condemned,” she told German lawmakers one day before her meeting with Putin.
Bolton’s comments Wednesday drew a quick retort from Russia, which argued that the United States is also bogged down in the country.
“It is not correct for anyone, let alone our counterparts in Washington, to claim that Russia has stuck someplace,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, per TASS, a state-run outlet. “Let us not forget that U.S. military personnel is present on Syrian soil, too. This should be borne in mind.”
