Don’t be relieved by Vladimir Putin’s cease-fire in Syria’s eastern Damascus suburb of Ghouta.
The cease-fire, which goes into effect on Tuesday, will last five hours each day and will supposedly operate alongside a humanitarian corridor for civilian evacuation.
Unfortunately, this is only a Putin gimmick designed to distract attention away from his culpability in Syrian President Bashar Assad’s latest massacre. Recognizing that global attention is now focused on the civilian suffering in Ghouta, Putin has a vested interest in appearing to take constructive action. Putin’s concern here is not the civilians, but rather how the appearance of their suffering weakens his broader Syrian objectives.
That’s because the images out of Ghouta make it harder for the Russian leader to pursue his two central objectives in Syria: consolidating Assad‘s power and pushing the U.S. out.
Pursing the first ambition, Russia is brokering peace talks between various Syrian groups that are designed to legitimize Assad’s future rule. Unfortunately for Putin, rebel organizations are boycotting the negotiations. On the latter pursuit, Putin is directing an increasingly aggressive effort to force the U.S. out of its enclave north of the Euphrates River valley.
The cease-fire gives Putin a way to protect his interests without serious cost.
First off, it offers a pretense of service to humanitarian interests. This, Putin hopes, will reduce international criticisms of Assad and by association, Russia. More importantly, the cease-fire doesn’t significantly obstruct Russian military ambitions in Ghouta.
After all, the cease-fire will only in operate for five hours a day. During those other 19 hours, Putin and Assad’s warplanes and artillery forces will continue to smash Ghouta.
At the same time, you can bet that any remotely military-aged males (probably 12 years old or older) leaving Ghouta via the humanitarian corridor will quickly find themselves walking down another long dark corridor. Namely, a corridor into one of Assad’s brutal gulags. There, they will be tortured and executed.
In that sense, the humanitarian corridor is not so much an olive branch as it is a KGB-style sword: a pretense of morality hiding a brutal instrument of domination.
The world must not fall for this trickery. We’ve seen Putin’s ceasefire morality before. As in Aleppo, it is measured by city rubble and civilian bodies.
