Emmanuel Grynszpan, Benjamin Quénelle
Russian air strikes have failed to keep Damascus in control of Aleppo. Moscow’s priority is Ukraine, not support for Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
The Kremlin is suffering both a political and military setback in Syria. The intervention of Russian aircraft in rebel sectors in the northwest of the country has not prevented the regime of Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Moscow and Tehran, from losing control of Aleppo for the first time since the start of the war in 2011. This defeat, inflicted by the offensive launched on November 27 by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its Turkish-backed allies, can be explained in Moscow’s eyes above all by the Syrian army’s weaknesses.
According to Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for Strategy and Technology Analysis, a Moscow think tank on military issues, “Faced with the largely underestimated restructuring carried out by the head of HTS to create a real military organization, there are many problems in the Syrian ranks: insufficient salaries, incompetent commanders, corruption, demobilization of battle-hardened soldiers, economic difficulties due to US sanctions. This is nothing new. The real problem is that this negligence at the head of Syria has ended up being passed on to its allies, including us.”
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