Russia has served notice that it will dominate the Middle East, and Bashar al-Assad will be the first beneficiary of Vladimir Putin’s new frontier. The Syrian army unleashed a new offensive against rebels in Idlib and Hama, backed by Russian air strikes on those areas. Not surprisingly, neither of those areas have an ISIS presence, but are key to the native insurgency that has fought Assad for more than three years:

Syria said Wednesday that government troops had launched a ground assault backed by intense Russian airstrikes and, for the first time, possibly Russian warships firing from offshore, targeting opposition forces.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said in Moscow that warships were targeting militant from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), but there was no immediate indication as to if or where artillery from Russian vessels was already landing in Syria.

CBS News correspondent Holly Williams says Russian airstrikes have pounded Syria for a week. Russia joined the more-than-four-year war saying it would target ISIS, but many of the locations Moscow says it has hit are not in areas controlled by ISIS militants.

The offensive announced Wednesday by Syria was purportedly focused in the central and western provinces of Idlib and Hama, where many of the Russian airstrikes have taken place. ISIS has little to no presence in Idlib, nor in the areas of Hama that have been targeted to date.

In case anyone believes that this is just a parallel effort to hem in ISIS, the Russians have made sure that the US understands that has been eclipsed by Moscow and Putin’s priorities. Russian fighters have repeatedly intercepted American Predator drones over Syria, in a none-too-subtle message to back off:

Russian fighter jets have intercepted U.S. predator drones on at least three separate occasions high above Syria since the start of Russia’s air campaign last week, according to two U.S. officials briefed on this latest intelligence from the region.

“The first time it happened, we thought the Russians got lucky. Then it happened two more times,” said one official.

Both officials said that the Russian intercepts took place over ISIS-controlled Syria, including its de facto headquarters in Raqqa and as well as along the Turkish-Syrian border near Korbani. Another intercept occurred in the northwest, near the highly contested city of Aleppo.

The Russians haven’t shot down any of the US drones … yet. Putin may try to make that unnecessary. After a suggestion from French president François Hollande, Putin agreed that he’d like to co-opt the US-backed Free Syrian Army to form an alliance with Assad against ISIS — if he can figure out where they are and who leads it:

Russian President Vladimir Putin says French President Francois Hollande last week suggested that government forces in Syria form an alliance with the opposition’s Free Syrian Army. …

Putin said in televised remarks Wednesday that he found Hollande’s idea “interesting” but insisted Moscow still has too little information on the Free Syrian Army. He says “we still don’t know where it is and who leads it.”

But the Russian leader added that “since (the Free Syrian Army) is supposed to be the combat unit of the so-called healthy opposition, it would create good conditions for a political settlement in Syria if they could join forces against the common enemy, terrorists, the Islamic State, the Nusra Front and others.”

Right now, though, Putin’s clearly prioritizing Assad’s survival as his first mission. His secondary mission is to push NATO out of the area, as seen by Russia’s forays into Turkish airspace over the past week. If ISIS is on Putin’s list of priorities, it comes in no better than third, and potentially much lower than that. Humiliating the US and our feckless policies in the region may either be a priority or simply a side benefit to Putin, but the vacuum left by Barack Obama in the Middle East and the destruction it has wrought has had a dangerous impact and emboldened Russia to get back in the superpower business.

Don’t think for a moment that our nominal Sunni allies in the region aren’t paying attention to this, either. It won’t be long before they’ll start orienting their policies toward Moscow rather than Washington. The Israelis may find themselves even more isolated than ever. This is a lot worse than just getting shown up by Putin.

Update: Speaking of which …

Iraq may request Russian air strikes against Islamic State on its soil soon and wants Moscow to have a bigger role than the United States in the war against the militant group, the head of parliament’s defense and security committee said on Wednesday.

“In the upcoming few days or weeks, I think Iraq will be forced to ask Russia to launch air strikes, and that depends on their success in Syria,” Hakim al-Zamili, a leading Shi’ite politician, told Reuters in an interview.

The comments were the clearest signal yet that Baghdad intends to lean on Russia in the war on Islamic State after U.S.-led coalition airstrikes produced limited results.

Update: Video fixed.