“This should be seen not only as a win for Putin, but also for Obama,” said Dmitry Gorenburg, an expert in Russian politics at the Center for Naval Analyses. “Everyone has latched onto it because it seems like a way out for Western countries that want to be seen as doing something, but were finding a lot of domestic resistance toward actual intervention.”

The benefit for Putin in cutting this deal, multiple analysts say, is not only that it protects Assad from American military might — Moscow also hopes that it will strengthen a norm against unilateral intervention. Russia aims to delegitimize military strikes not sanctioned by the U.N. Security Council, where it holds a veto, and fears that this principle was badly eroded by the NATO campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, and the Libya campaign more recently. Putin harped on this point in an op-ed published in the New York Times this week, where he argued that Moscow was “not protecting the Syrian government, but international law,” which was one of the only tools to “keep international relations from sliding into chaos.”

The chemical weapons deal, therefore, provided Putin with an opportunity “to make sure that the U.S. is more firmly embedded in international institutions,” according to Gorenburg. “They are the weaker power, and throughout history weaker powers have tried to use international powers to constrain stronger powers.”