Any substantive deal winning Putin away from his Persian embrace would almost certainly entail the lifting of all U.S. sanctions on Russia for the invasion and occupation of Ukraine, plus formally recognizing Crimea as sovereign Russian territory. Such a diplomatic volte-face would put Washington in violation of international law and make it a pariah among Western liberal democracies, or what’s left of them.
Moreover, Iran is the primary ground force in Syria, meaning that whether the Kremlin likes it or not, its military bases and intelligence assets are all at the mercy of Iran’s janissaries. “We are toast without Hezbollah,” the analyst said matter-of-factly, noting that the Russians are currently trying to “train and equip two Moscow-controlled Syrian Coastal Divisions.” Even assuming these were to come into some semblance of professional existence, they would still be woefully insufficient to hold all the strategic ground retaken from Syrian rebels in the last two years. Other Russian military analysts acidly agree that Assad’s army is barely a paper kitten at this point.
The extent to which Putin and Khamenei’s “facts on the ground” have grown codependent has been outlined in detailed by Paul Bucala, an Iran expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (PDF). He, too, concludes that “any U.S. appeasement effort to persuade Russia to abandon Iran in Syria will ultimately be unsuccessful.” His evidence is arrayed on the Syrian battlefield.
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