The debate about what motivated Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine is freewheeling, but much of it strangely ignores Putin himself. Many, such as University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer, blame NATO enlargement. Others say the chaotic American withdrawal from Afghanistan emboldened the Russian strongman. Yale historian Timothy Snyder counters this by arguing the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots influenced Putin’s sense of American weakness far more.
Such theories miss three points. First, ideology matters. As Russian chess grandmaster-turned-democracy activist Garry Kasparov notes in his prescient 2015 book Winter is Coming, Putin’s antipathy toward the West is almost as deep as his irrational hatred of Ukrainian nationalism. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s decision to split away from its Russian counterpart was a shot across the bow for Putin, who sees defending Russian Orthodoxy as one of his primary obligations.
Second, Putin has agency. He is proactive rather than reactive. Self-flagellation and partisan mudslinging might be an American sport, but it is arrogant and inaccurate to believe all actions revolve around Washington. Simply put, Putin would covet Ukraine regardless of who was in the White House. If he blames the United States, it is only because he knows it to be an effective distraction while he pursues his core objectives.
Finally, Putin has a long history with which such behavior is fully consistent, and it began well before the assault on Ukraine and the presidencies of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Putin not only solidified his reputation for being the steward of resurgent Russian power while at the helm during the Second Chechen War (1999-2000), but he also perfected the use of false flag terrorism to justify brutal pacification. He planned to repeat the tactic to justify his most recent Ukraine invasion, only to have the White House’s exposure of the plot undercut the fiction.
In 2008, Putin ordered the invasion and seizure of portions of Georgia. Again, he spun a tale to flip reality on its head, arguing that Russian forces were carrying out their “responsibility to protect” against a Georgian regime bent on conducting genocide in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. This, of course, was nonsense. Georgia’s sin was a people’s power revolution that ousted former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and then sought to reorient Georgia to the West. Then, of course, there’s Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, which resulted in the seizure both of Crimea and parts of the Donbas.
Beyond all of Putin’s misbehavior in Russia’s “Near Abroad,” lost in the Western narrative has been Syria — and the lessons Putin learned from that country’s ongoing civil war that shape his calculus today.
First, some history: Moscow’s relationship with Damascus and the Assad family predates the Soviet Union’s demise. Hafez al Assad, then serving as defense minister, seized power in a 1970 coup. Over the next few years, he traveled to the Soviet Union repeatedly to meet with its general secretary Leonid Brezhnev. In 1971, Assad granted the Soviet Union a naval base in the Mediterranean port of Tartus; when the Soviet Union collapsed, Tartus remained Russia’s only military base outside the confines of the former Soviet Union. Hundreds of Syrians studied in Moscow, and many returned to Syria with Russian wives. Putin considers their offspring Russians, even if they speak only Arabic and have never stepped foot inside Russia, and claims a responsibility to protect.
When protests erupted in southern Syria 11 years ago, Bashar Assad, who succeeded his father in 2000, responded with brutality. That strategy may have worked in the era before cellphones, but as images of his savagery spread, the country erupted. Within weeks, it looked like he might lose control. Rumors abounded that Bashar actually lived onboard a Russian ship, only helicoptering into Damascus for the occasional speech.
It was in this context that, a decade ago, Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi confirmed what the international community long suspected: Syria had a chemical and biological weapons program. Soon after, President Barack Obama told the White House press corps, “We have communicated in no uncertain terms with every player in the region that that’s a red line for us and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front or the use of chemical weapons.” To underscore his point, senior White House officials began calling journalists, think tankers, and former officials on background to suggest that any Syrian use of chemical weapons would result in American military retaliation.
It took only four months for Assad to put Obama to the test. On Dec. 23, 2012, reports trickled out of Homs, a city the size of Denver, that the Assad regime had used “poisonous gas” against civilians. A leaked cable from the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul found the evidence of Syrian chemical weapons to be “compelling,” even as the White House downplayed the incident.
But chemical warfare can’t be swept under the rug. Within months, reports surfaced that the regime had used chemical weapons against opposition strongholds in both Damascus and Aleppo. Obama described the reports as a “game changer” but made no move to enforce his red line. As new reports trickled in, Obama explained he needed “strong evidence” before considering next steps. He did not need to wait long. After eight months of testing U.S. mettle produced no reaction, Assad’s forces launched a massive chemical strike on East Ghouta, killing at least 1,000.
In the aftermath of the attack, calls mounted, including from within his own inner circle, for Obama to take action. The president instead stood down. As a face-saving measure, he embraced a Russian proposal to remove Syrian chemical weapons and place them under international control in exchange for a U.S. pledge not to launch military strikes. “America is not the world’s policeman. Terrible things happen across the globe, and it is beyond our means to right every wrong,” he explained in a televised address. As Biden’s team does today, Obama’s team worried publicly that granting democrats the means to resist dictators would lead to World War III. Such exaggeration played into Putin’s hands in Syria and continues to benefit the Russian dictator today. While Assad forfeited some chemical compounds, in subsequent months, it became apparent that Syria’s program continued. Inspectors privately complained they came under immense diplomatic pressure to report that Assad was being fully cooperative.
With this history as prelude, warnings by national security adviser Jake Sullivan to his Russian counterpart Nikolay Patrushev that there would be “consequences” to “any possible Russian decision to use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine” fall flat. Red lines have consequences not only when enforced but also when ignored. The full consequences of Obama’s fiasco have yet to be seen, but Ukrainians may well pay the price, especially after Biden repeatedly telegraphed his fear of escalating conflict with Russia.
What happened in Syria did not stay in Syria. Russian diplomats and intelligence officials used both Assad’s political survival and the Kremlin’s maneuvering to indemnify Syria against any meaningful retaliation as a talking point in their relations with the Arab world and Iran. Against the backdrop of Washington’s human rights advocacy, Egyptian officials say a common Russian talking point is they always stand by their friends, no matter what their domestic policy. It is a compelling argument not only for Cairo but also for Riyadh, Tunis, Abu Dhabi, and other capitals increasingly frustrated by the Biden administration’s combination of preachiness, ephemeral promises, and disdain toward allies.
For Putin, Syria was a testing ground not only for chemical weapons, but also for other tactics now on display in Ukraine, especially since Putin knows he will be rewarded for merely saying he’ll do something and not following through. While serving as Obama’s assistant secretary of state, Philip Gordon credited the persistence of diplomacy for the Russian announcement that it would withdraw its forces from Syria’s Khmeimim Air Base. In reality, Putin recommitted to the Russian presence. Failure was good to Gordon; today, he is Vice President Kamala Harris’s national security adviser. Meanwhile, despite the Russian Defense Ministry’s announcement that Kyiv would no longer be its aim, Russia continues not only to redeploy troops from the Caucasus into Ukraine but also to bomb the Ukrainian capital.
President Ronald Reagan often cited the Russian proverb Doveryay, no proveryay, “Trust, but verify.” Unfortunately, Biden’s team, like Obama’s, prefers to trust without verifying. For a former KGB officer like Putin, the naivete of his American counterparts provides him hope that, no matter how bad the initial battles might go, he can still snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, even if it means killing or displacing millions of people.
Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
