Russia's experience in Syria informs approach to Ukraine, NATO
The opportunity to field-test its next-generation weapons systems in recent years has emboldened the Kremlin to raise the stakes in Ukraine, and so has experience in brinkmanship with Turkey over Syria.
Six Russian landing ships from the Baltic and Northern Fleets, which had previously arrived at the Russian naval base of Tartus in Syria, were transferred to the Black Sea on Feb. 8 to participate in military maneuvers by the Russian army and navy.
The passage through Tartus once again demonstrated the importance of this facility for Moscow’s Mediterranean fleet. Tartus not only serves as Russia's foothold in the Middle East, but also as an element of military infrastructure for Moscow's global confrontation with Washington and Brussels. The same applies to the Khmeimim Russian air base in Syria, whose capabilities have been expanded recently.
The Russian military campaign in Syria, which began in 2015, in many respects prepared Moscow on a military-technical level for the current confrontation between Russia and the United States and NATO, as well as the Russian-Ukrainian escalation.
Russian President Vladimir Putin inherited an incompetent Russian army with an archaic structure and outdated weapons, which was struggling to suppress the guerrilla actions of separatist militants in the Chechen Republic. The Russian-Georgian conflict of 2008 revealed major problems in the Russian army, associated with the obsolescence of not only military equipment, but also auxiliary means (for example, communications). It called into question whether Russian armed forces could defeat an enemy equipped with modern weapons — such as the armies of NATO countries.
