This mentality—that only non-state actors could be terrorists, and that the solution to terrorism was to unite the world’s governments against them—made Putin’s “anti-terrorism” a rationale for state terror. In 2015, as Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad waged a brutal civil war against Islamists and other armed factions, Putin argued that other countries should defend Assad’s regime. “The collapse of Syria’s official authorities” would “mobilize terrorists,” he warned. “It may be true that the USA have the goal to get rid of al-Assad. Our goal is to combat terrorism and to help President al-Assad gain victory over terrorism.” By opposing the anti-Assad terrorists, Putin argued, Russia’s forces were standing with the Syrian people.

Putin’s military campaign in Syria became a grisly showcase for his twisted version of anti-terrorism. A U.N. commission report found that in the city of Aleppo, during the second half of 2016, “Syrian and Russian forces carried out daily air strikes, claiming hundreds of lives and reducing hospitals, schools and markets to rubble.” The atrocities documented in the report eerily resemble what’s happening in Ukraine, including air strikes on a women’s hospital, a bread line, and buildings that were clearly marked as civilian…

These political demands, coupled with Russia’s relentless mass killing, complete the portrait of Putin’s strategy. He’s bombing civilians and destroying property to intimidate the population and influence Ukraine’s government. By Russia’s own definition, that’s terrorism. But because Putin is the perpetrator, his regime will never acknowledge the crime. Instead, Lavrov insists that the real villains are Ukrainian “militants” who “radicalize and terrorize others” and “are trained to stage terrorist attacks.”