Putin's busy 'election' agenda includes moving missiles and, in Syria, digging in
Russia 'going after its goals with a great deal more assertiveness, aggression, conviction'
In the blur of a raucous week in the U.S. election campaign, it was easy to miss an ongoing, much wider public relations offensive on the other side of the world.
Rarely do Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad appear in foreign media interviews as often they have this past week. Even Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov gave a rare interview to CNN, outlining their common stance, in plain English.
Russia, clearly, has a message.
"I feel sorry for what is happening now in Russian-American relations," said Lavrov. "I can only reaffirm that it was not us who started this very unhealthy kind of relationship, and this started long before Ukraine, long before Syria."
Indeed it did, though how it started is up for debate.
But it is Syria — Aleppo — that has brought the simmering tension between the world's top two nuclear powers to a near boil-over, enough for international politicians and analysts to start publicly warning of the possibility of an outright U.S.-Russia war.
It's still far from that. But the rupture over Russian airstrikes in support of Syrian forces in Aleppo is the lowest point in the world's bellwether relationship, and with the highest stakes, we're told, since the Cuban Missile Crisis, but already, far, far deadlier.
Unlike the 1962 crisis — when the death of one pilot pulled the U.S. and the Soviet Union back from the brink of all-out war — the daily carnage in Syria seems to have failed to push the players enough to pull back from a slide to an even darker place.
Top Russian and US diplomats met with regional players Saturday, and as expected, after four and a half hours of talks, they had nothing substantive to report.
The war in Syria would rage on. The siege of Aleppo would hold.
Putin a busy man
After the latest ceasefire collapsed last month, the U.S. had suspended talks with Russia, calling for a war crimes investigation into Russian and Syrian airstrikes.
It also officially accused Russia of meddling in its election campaign, of hacking and leaking Democratic Party emails, and it promised to retaliate.
President Barack Obama also convened his top advisers to consider options for acting in Syria to try to stop the bombing. Having passed up red lines in the past, those options are narrow without risking full confrontation with Russia.
Putin, meanwhile, has been a very busy man, on his own campaign to further limit those options, and further entrench Russia's presence in Syria.
Russia already had the upper hand in Syria, but it just moved S-300 anti-aircraft missiles there, promising to shoot down U.S. planes if they threaten their Syrian allies.
Allowing Russian troops to stay indefinitely
Russia's parliament voted to endorse a deal with Syria to allow an open-ended stay for its military.
Putin dropped or suspended nuclear-related pacts with the U.S. and accused it of deliberately targeting Syrian forces in a strike early in the ceasefire.
Russia also moved nuclear-capable missiles into Kaliningrad, its westernmost border, making its neighbours nervous (a move Moscow notes is on its own territory, and part of a routine drill.)
Meanwhile, rival resolutions at the UN Security Council to end the fighting have failed — one because of a Russian veto.
The lightning speed of succession of all this speaks of Putin's apparent determination to set the stage for the next U.S. presidency by establishing unmovable facts on the ground — facts the new president will urgently have to deal with.
The American public may still call Barack Obama president, but Putin has already moved on.
"[Russia] is going after its goals with a great deal more assertiveness, aggression, conviction than has ever been the case," says James Nixey, head of the Russia and Eurasia program at London's Chatham House.
"The election in North America, the Brexit situation, does mean that resources are diverted, attention is distracted and that does give Russia a vacuum in which it can operate. And of course Russia is the more committed actor."
And that brings us back to the PR offensive, which in the past days has also taken Putin to Turkey and India.
Putin — echoed in turn by Lavrov and Assad in their own interviews — insisted in an interview with a French network that the blame for the tension and the Mideast chaos falls squarely on the West, and chiefly the U.S.
He also insisted that the fight in Aleppo — which has included strikes on hospitals and an aid convoy — is about rooting out terrorists hiding among civilians.
Assad, for his part, insisted that "cleaning" Aleppo is key to an overall defeat of those opponents.
More than a Cold War
He also acknowledged in an interview with a Russian paper that his country has become a key theatre for the U.S. and Russia rivalry to play out.
"What we have now … is something like more than Cold War, less than war, or full-blown war."
In that one narrow point, he is right. When U.S. aircraft are being threatened, when Washington is again considering military action in Syria — and when there's consternation over a Russian aircraft carrier passing through the English Channel en route to Syria — it's a lot more than a Cold War.
In the meantime, it is an offensive in pursuit of a geopolitical reset that would put Russia higher up the world's power hierarchy, says Nixey.
"He wants to be involved in all matters of international affairs and be given a say," says Nixey.
"They asked for equality … equality means equality with the other great power: the U.S."
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