[When Mr. Putin returned to the presidency
a year ago, he moved aggressively to stamp out a growing protest movement and
silence competing and independent voices. He shored up his position at home
but, as his government promoted nationalism with a hostile edge, passed antigay
legislation, locked up illegal immigrants in a city camp, kept providing arms
to the Syrian government and ultimately gave refuge to the leaker Mr. Snowden,
Mr. Putin was increasingly seen in the West as a calloused, out-of-touch
modern-day czar.]
By Steven Lee Myers
Yet suddenly
Mr. Putin has eclipsed Mr. Obama as the world leader driving the agenda in the
Syria crisis. He is offering a potential, if still highly uncertain,
alternative to what he has vocally criticized as America’s militarism and
reasserted Russian interests in a region where it had been marginalized since
the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Although
circumstances could shift yet again, Mr. Putin appears to have achieved several
objectives, largely at Washington’s expense. He has handed a diplomatic
lifeline to his longtime ally in Syria, President Bashar al-Assad, who not long
ago appeared at risk of losing power and who President Obama twice said must
step down. He has stopped Mr. Obama from going around the United Nations
Security Council, where Russia holds a veto, to assert American priorities
unilaterally.
More generally,
Russia has at least for now made itself indispensable in containing the
conflict in Syria, which Mr. Putin has argued could ignite Islamic unrest
around the region, even as far as Russia’s own restive Muslim regions, if it is
mismanaged. He has boxed Mr. Obama into treating Moscow as an essential partner
for much of the next year, if Pentagon estimates of the time it will take to
secure Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile are accurate.
“Putin probably
had his best day as president in years yesterday,” Ian Bremmer, the president
of Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy,
said in a conference call on Wednesday, “and I suspect he’s enjoying himself
right now.”
In an Op-Ed article in The New York Times released on
Wednesday, Mr. Putin laid down a strong challenge to Mr. Obama’s vision of how
to address the turmoil, arguing that a military strike risked “spreading the
conflict far beyond Syria’s borders” and would violate international law,
undermining postwar stability.
“It is alarming
that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has
become commonplace for the United States,” Mr. Putin wrote. “Is it in America’s
long-term interest? I doubt it.”
When Mr. Putin
returned to the presidency a year ago, he moved aggressively to stamp out a
growing protest movement and silence competing and independent voices. He
shored up his position at home but, as his government promoted nationalism with
a hostile edge, passed antigay legislation, locked up illegal immigrants in a
city camp, kept providing arms to the Syrian government and ultimately gave
refuge to the leaker Mr. Snowden, Mr. Putin was increasingly seen in the West
as a calloused, out-of-touch modern-day czar.
Now he appears
to be relishing a role as a statesman. His spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said in
an interview that the Russian president was not seeking “ownership of the
initiative,” but wanted only to promote a political solution to head off a
wider military conflict in the Middle East.
“It’s only the
beginning of the road,” Mr. Peskov said, “but it’s a very important beginning.”
To get started,
Mr. Putin sent his foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, to Geneva on Thursday to
meet with Secretary of State John Kerry, in hopes of hammering out the myriad
logistical details of putting a sprawling network of chemical sites under
international control in the middle of a deadly civil war.
Even that step
was another indication of just how much the circumstances have changed in such
a short time. Only a week ago, Mr. Putin was accusing Mr. Kerry of lying to
Congress about the presence of militants allied with Al Qaeda in Syria. “He’s
lying,” he said in televised remarks. “And he knows he’s lying. It’s sad.”
On Wednesday, when
Russia submitted a package of proposals to the Americans and others ahead of
that meeting in Geneva, Mr. Peskov again used the opportunity to try to paint
Russia as the peacemaker to the United States’ war maker. Mr. Peskov declined
to release details of the plan, other than to say Russia’s most important
condition was that Syria’s willingness to give up its weapons could only be
tested if the United States refrained from the retaliation Mr. Obama has
threatened. “Any strike will make this impossible,” Mr. Peskov said.
From the start
of the war two and a half years ago, Russia has been Syria’s strongest backer,
using its veto repeatedly to block any meaningful action at the Security
Council. While Russia has ties to the country dating to the Soviet era,
including its only naval base left outside of the former Soviet republics, Mr.
Putin’s primary goal is not preserving Mr. Assad’s government — despite arms
sales that account for billions of dollars — as much as thwarting what he
considers to be unbridled American power to topple governments it opposes.
Mr. Putin’s
defense of Syria, including continuing assertions that the rebels, not
government forces, had used chemical weapons, has at times made him seem intent
on opposing the United States regardless of any contrary facts or evidence.
Russia has long had the support of China at the Security Council, but Mr. Putin
had won support for his position by exploiting the divisions that appeared
between the United States and its allies. That was especially true after
Britain’s Parliament refused to endorse military action, a step Mr. Putin
described as mature.
He also slyly
voiced encouragement when leaders of Russia’s Parliament suggested they go to
the United States to lobby Congress to vote against the authorization Mr. Obama
sought — something he himself would deride as unacceptable interference if the
table were reversed.
Mr. Putin’s
palpable hostility to what he views as the supersized influence of the United
States around the world explains much of the anti-American sentiment that he
and his supporters have stoked since he returned as president last year after
serving four years as prime minister under his anointed successor, Dmitri A.
Medvedev. It was under Mr. Medvedev that Russia abstained in a Security Council
vote to authorize the NATO intervention in Libya that ultimately toppled that
country’s dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Mr. Putin has made it clear that
he would not repeat what most here consider a mistake that unleashed a wave of
extremism that has spread across the region.
For now, Mr.
Putin succeeded in forcing the international debate over Syria back to the
Security Council, where Russia’s veto gives it a voice in any international
response. With Russia’s relations with Europe increasingly strained over
economic pressure and political issues, the Security Council gives Russia a
voice in shaping geopolitics.
At the same
time, Mr. Putin carries the risk of Russia again having to veto any security
resolution that would back up the international control over Syria’s weapons
with the threat of force, as France proposed.
Not
surprisingly, given the Kremlin’s control over most media here, Mr. Putin’s
11th-hour gambit was nonetheless widely applauded. “The Russian president has
become a hero in the world these days,” the newscast of NTV began on Wednesday
night before going on to note that Mr. Putin should be nominated for a Nobel
Peace Prize if he averted the American strike.
There was also
satisfaction that it was Mr. Putin who gave an American president whom he
clearly distrusts a way out of a political and diplomatic crisis of his own
making. Aleksei K. Pushkov, the chairman of the lower house of Parliament’s
foreign affairs committee, wrote on Twitter that Mr. Obama should gratefully
grab Russia’s proposal with “both hands.”
“It gives him a
chance not to start another war, not to lose in the Congress and not to become
the second Bush,” Mr. Pushkov said.
