Personal note: After eight years, I am once again writing an article dealing with Syria and geopolitics. What makes a German of retirement age want to deal with a distant country? Well, foreign and security policy was a field of interest during my university studies. With NATO’s illegal war of aggression on Yugoslavia and subsequently with the West’s imperialist wars in the Orient, my consciousness, once carefully indoctrinated by naivety and media consumption, gained the first effective cracks. In 2011, NATO was just bombing ‚democracy and liberty‘ into Libya, I became acquainted with a Syrian lady from Aleppo who, with patience, was able to finally bring down the remains of my wall of NATO-fuelled ignorance. Since then, I have been working on the topic of Syria. In several articles, I have dealt with my country’s dirty role against Syria – as much as it is possible using public sources. Im 2016 I felt vindicated by the article ‘Germany and the UN against Syria’ by Thierry Meyyan (https://www.voltairenet.org/article190102.html), which reveals the truly sordid details of the German government’s collaboration with the war criminals from Washington. The question of ‘why’ remains. Well, perhaps it is the realisation of the true nature of the ‘German’ foreign policy steered by the USA – and the desperate indignation it has sparked to me.
I After the fall of Damascus
‘Is Putin capable of strategic thinking?’ asks Paul Craig Roberts in his article of 19 December 2024 (https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2024/12/19/is-putin-capable-of-strategic-thinking/).
I would like to take up this question and discuss it against the backdrop of events in Syria and the Donbass.
After Putin’s withdrawal from the Syria mission and the subsequent fall of this culturally diverse nation into the hands of the enemies of humanity, doubts about Putin’s strategic ability seem to be appropriate. After all, Putin has sacrificed Russia’s only ally in Arabia – and indeed its most loyal ally. The victors in Syria are Russia’s enemies. The signal to the remaining allies and the community of nations united in BRICS could therefore be something like this: Take what you can from Russia, but don’t trust the Kremlin an inch!
Is this development in Russia’s favour? Regarding the accelerating escalation of the international situation (and please don’t give me any more nonsense about ‘saviour Trump’!), the current situation seems to be unfavourable for Russia and its allies. In fact, the brutal and successful Israeli-Turkish charade has completely reversed the situation, and today the losers are those who yesterday seemed to be marching on the road to victory. Erdogan and Netanyahu are the shining winners, Syria and Putin are the losers with their pants down.
Of course, I am unable to assess whether the man in the Kremlin is actually a Western agent who is ‘dismembering Russia’ in the service of the American pirates, as one blogger wrote in early 2024 (https://multipolaristen.de/multipolaristen/politik/internationale-politik/rurik-skywalker-totaler-z-sieg-strelkow-zu-vier-jahren-gulag-verurteilt-seine-unterstuetzer-gleich-mitverhaftet-26-01-2024/). Doubts about Putin’s strategic abilities, but above all about his determination, have nevertheless been voiced in Russia for years (https://slavlandchronicles.substack.com/p/making-sense-of-syria-helps-us-understand). Sometimes this made the holder of this opinion taking a state-financed holiday, like Igor Girkin (4 years in prison).
Let us keep in mind that Putin allowed himself to be stalled for eight years when he sat idle, watching from the high battlements of the Kremlin as the Ukrainian army slaughtered Russians (!) in the Donbass, without doing more than protesting and begging his enemies to stop. It is claimed that in 2014, when the western-orchestrated coup in Kiev built the foundations for the massacre in Odessa and the genocide in Donbass, the Russian army was not yet at the same combat-related technological level as it is today. This is the argument: Russia still needed time (this time was bought with the blood of around 15,000 people in the Donbass who were slaughtered by Ukraine). However, the objection here is that in 2014 the Ukrainian army was not at the level that NATO considers appropriate for a war with Russia. In contrast to Russia, however, the Ukrainians used the time chance not only to arm itself but to continue committing acts of genocide against Russians.
The people of Donbass, however, fought back. After all, in 2015, the german Chancellor Merkel persuaded Putin to agree to an arrangement called Minsk, allegedly to stop the bloodshed. The real goal, however, was to save the Ukrainian army from a defeat in the Donbass. This Ukrainian army at this time was already being prepared for war against Russia in Grafenwoehr in Bavaria. Without Minsk, the Donbass-militia of Igor Girkin (‘Strelkov’) would have caused the ukrainain army a decisive defeat. What a setback that would have been for the West’s plans! It was not NATO’s agent Merkel who stabbed Russia’s Donbass in the back and stole the victory won with blood from its militia – it was Putin.
At the beginning of the 2000s, there had already been a coup in Kiev, the so-called ‘Orange Revolution’ (Yuschenko / Timoshenko), had been staged in order to pull Ukraine towards the West and establish it as a front against Russia. In 2008, it was invited to apply for membership of NATO. The same thing happened in Georgia under Sakashvili, who even attacked Russian troops in the Caucasus.
Had Putin forgotten Minsk? In 2022, Mrs. Merkel has openly admitted the tactic of stalling Putin with the Minsk agreements in order to give Ukraine time to prepare for war. Hollande and Cameron eagerly confirmed her statement. Putin laments having been cheated by Merkel with the Minsk agreements. It takes two to cheat.
In the third year of the war, the Russian leadership has now resorted to trumpeting the victorious capture of depopulated small settlements in the Donbass while American missiles are falling on Russia, Ukrainians are slaughtering civilians in Russia and Kiev is sending explosive greetings all the way to Kazan.
With Minks serving NATO and Ukraine, Putin repeated it with the ‘Astana format’, the useless talk about Syria with Erdogan and Iran. Pardon, logically it should read: AGAINST Syria, because in Astana as in Minsk, the powers negotiated about people who were not even involved. What do you call that: Colonialism, Sykes-Picot 2.0?
Had Minsk already fallen out of Putin’s view when it was working in the best interests of Kiev’s sponsors? Has Putin, after Merkel’s public humiliation, finally pulled the ripcord on his appeasement towards NATO? Has he increased measures to secure the Donbass and Syria – and thus Russia’s own geostrategic interests, instead? No, on the contrary. There are still Ukrainian army units in the Donbass today. On Syria, Putin agreed with Erdogan, the boss of HTS, to preserve the CIA, MIT and Mossad jihadists in Idlib, a governorate in northwestern Syria that borders Turkey. Thanks to Putin’s agreements with Erdogan, Idlib became a de facto extraterritorial terrorist stronghold in Syria. Here, the gangs could be rebuilt, armed and trained, and the Turks diligently transported weapons and equipment to Syria in small-scale border traffic. Here in Idlib, under the eyes of the Russians, Turkey created a quasi-state infrastructure and allowed head-choppers to mime government. The Russians and Turks carried out joint controls on the line of contact, keeping the Syrian Arab Army away from their baby, and ensuring that the constant attacks by the Idlib-based Jihadists on Aleppo could not be fought by the Syrian Arab Army. Logistically, the Syrian Arab Army had apparently been in a position to contain and eliminate this terror spawn right up to the end. But Putin / Erdogan did not want this, and Assad seems to have given in in the end. Until the end, brave Syria fought with one hand tied on its back, and often even with both, shackled by the Kremlin’s desire for reconciliation with the masters of the Jihadists. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have paid the price with their lives since 2011. Also, Putin’s recent, utterly shameless recriminations against his former ally (https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2024/12/20/is-reality-gaining-a-foothold-on-putins-thinking/) give me no reason to hope for a change in the Kremlin’s strategy. Fruitful lessons from the Syrian catastrophe authorised by Putin seem to be undesirable. The price for Putin’s fatal Syria strategy is being paid by the survivors with occupation, a destroyed country, a collapsed economy, hyperinflation, impoverishment, hunger, terrorism against religious minorities as well as Syrians loyal to their nation, displacement and a gang of head-choppers in the service of the Western secret services acting as ‘government’. Incase that is what you wanted, Mr. Putin, you were successful. Congratulations.
II And what next?
The result of Putin’s strategy is clear: In the Ukraine war, the bear is still dancing on Russian soil, a ‘demilitarisation and denazification’ of Ukraine, official guidelines of the ‘Special Military Operation’ (SMO), have yet not been achieved. Syria has fallen, with the worst consequences for the Syrian people, for Lebanon, for Palestine and for Iran – and beyond that for the Central Asian region and the Caucasus. And perhaps ultimately for the whole of humanity.
Under the eyes of the whole world, the Palestinian people, legitimate holder of the land rights of the Holy Land, will be wiped out. Those whom Zion can not kill will be expelled, but where to? Lebanon will either be occupied and annexed by Israel or implode (and then be ‘pacified’ by Israeli and US bombs). In the end there will be ‘Greater Israel’. If necessary, the evil empire will move its army of Zio-Wahhabi scum to other theatres of crisis in order to inflict further defeats on Russia and keep Russia in constant tension – just as the RAND-memorandum of 2019 had described.
Did Mr Putin not know about Netanyahu’s plans for ‘Greater Israel’ and the ‘Greater Turan Project’ of the wanna-be Caliph Erdogan? Does Russia have neither an intelligence service nor reliable geostrategic analysts? Does Moscow not read the Israeli and Turkish memoranda? What do these people actually do all day?
The aim of the Russian campaign in Syria, which began in 2015, is said to have been the pre-emptive destruction of (Western-manufactured) terrorism in Syria itself. Not only has Putin not achieved this goal, but the exact opposite: terrorists are in Damascus, Turkey, the US and Israel have taken over Syria. This is undoubtedly the most important of all Turkish victories over the old enemy.
In 2015, ‘IS’, the Pentagon jihad brigade, stood outside Damascus. With the help of the Russian airforce, the Syrian army heroically fought back the satanic filth. Today, with ‘HTS’, the CIA-puppets of Al-Qaeda are now in Damascus. This result makes me wonder why Russia went to Syria in the first place, spent millions of roubles and yet achieved nothing. In view of Putin’s apparent indecision and his almost touching endeavours to negotiate and achieve agreements with the mortal enemies of his people, the next possible defeats already do appear on the horizon. With Georgia, Kazakhstan and Armenia (already being a fundamental defeat for Putin, too!), the scenes have already been set and the audience, the Western warlords, are already lounging with popcorn in the front row. Iran is being isolated. And the bloodthirsty, war-mongering Zionist brigade of the coming US administration will certainly want to see nothing else other than missile fireworks in Tehran.
The development clearly contradicts Russia’s fundamental interests. If things go on like this, Russia could end up standing naked in front of the wall and, as Paul Craig Roberts has repeatedly emphasised, has only two options left: Surrender or nuclear war. Who (apart from the psychopaths in the West) could want that? So the question is not really whether Putin can think strategically. Well, maybe he can. The question is: for whom?
Stefan H. Heuer, M.A., historian, born in 1964, has worked as a lecturer in adult education and, among others,
in Human Ressources development for an US-American company in Germany.