Putin’s on the March
Blame lame-duck Obama
AS Americans focus on who’ll replace President Obama, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin marches around the globe unabated, rushing to gobble up anything and everything he can before the new president takes office.
Amassing troops on Ukraine’s border. Bombing Syria mercilessly. Allying with Turkey, a NATO member, to bring it into the Moscow-Tehran-Damascus axis.
On Tuesday, Russia announced it was using an Iranian air base to launch bombing sorties in Syria. That’s quite a coup. The mullahs don’t easily allow foreigners to use their soil for military purposes. Iranian officials protest that the Russian Air Force merely uses Iran for “refueling,” but that’s not what Moscow says or Washington sees.
Also, last week Moscow revealed a plan to turn Hmeymim, Syria, an airbase near Latakia, into a “fullfledged” Russian facility, making it a permanent Russian hub in the world’s hottest war zone. (Unlike the Iranian base, Hmeymim can’t facilitate Tupolev-22M3 or Sukhoi-34 heavy bombers, needed to escalate Putin’s Syria war.)
Syria’s hottest current battle is over Aleppo, once a financial capital and now a ghost town filled with extremists where Russian and Syrian-government planes pound schools and hospitals.
And American officials, at best, make speeches about the need to help the United Nations deliver humanitarian aid to Aleppo.
We won’t do much about Putin’s renewed aggression against Ukraine, either. On the pretext that Ukrainian extremists are planning “sabotage” in Crimea (the peninsula Putin annexed two years ago), Russia last week amassed 40,000 additional troops on the Crimea-Ukraine border.
It reminded Ukrainian UN Ambassador Volodymyr Yelchenko of 2008: “During the Olympic Games, on the eve of a US election, Russia started aggression against Georgia,” he said, “pointing to parallels” to that time, when Putin annexed Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions by force.
And what are we doing about this? We rebuff Ukraine’s pleas for defensive arms, even as other strategic assets in the former Soviet Union are in Putin’s crosshairs. Last week, for example, he signed a new three-way pact with Azerbaijan and Turkey.
Wait, Turkey? Wasn’t President Recep Tayyip Erdogan angry as hell with Moscow? Didn’t Putin sever ties after Turkey downed a Russian plane near its Syria border in 2015?
That was then. This is now. Erdogan visited Moscow last week, and the two are now thick as thieves, even raising fears about the integrity of NATO. (Remember: Strategically located Turkey commands the alliance’s second-largest army.)
Erdogan is angry over our refusal to extradite Fatullah Gulen, the Pennsylvania-based preacher Erdogan accuses of masterminding a failed military coup against him. But will Turkey now bar US and NATO planes from continuing to use the Incirlik airbase near the Syrian border?
“You have never seen such a cheap tactic from Turkey,” an Ankara parliamentarian named Taha Ozhan told me recently.
Well, at least not since 2003, when Erdogan abruptly blocked a US-led alliance from using Turkish soil to launch the Iraq war, forcing a major last-minute strategy shift.
Either way, Putin sees a US-Turkish rift and seizes on it. With his Turkey-Azerbaijan move, which includes a planned natural-gas pipeline, he can dominate Central Europe’s energy markets. And as a bo- nus, Turkey and Russia are promising to share intelligence on Syria.
Though we’ll see if that lasts. After all, unlike Russia, Erdogan remains opposed to keeping Assad in power.
But wait, hasn’t Secretary of State John Kerry been trying to negotiate a similar intel-sharing agreement with Moscow since mid-July? Well, yes — but it’s on ice.
And so is an announced US-Russian plan to launch political talks aimed at ending the Syrian war. The plan’s coordinator, UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura, is on the verge of resigning, I’m told. He’s frustrated by the fact that talks between Moscow and Washington have led nowhere.
“From early on, de Mistura’s plan was to lead from behind,” a senior diplomat told me recently. “In this case, it meant leading behind America and Russia.”
Or, he added, “to be perfectly honest, it’s really just Russia.”
We’re too obsessed with allegations of Kremlin meddling in our election to even notice Putin’s global march, let alone do anything about it.
Putin’s known as a great poker player who holds the weakest hand. But we facilitate his activist, daring and immoral style of play by constantly whining about our own hand, and by endlessly waiting to be dealt a pair of aces.
No wonder Putin now sits in front of a much larger stack of chips than even he dreamed of eight years ago, when he began this expansion in earnest by invading Georgia with barely a peep from Bush-era America.