Putin Propagandists Befuddled by Assad Defeat
They’re stumbling over themselves to blame everyone and everything but Putin’s war in Ukraine.
ON SUNDAY NIGHT, BOTH THE HOST AND THE GUESTS on Evening with Vladimir Solovyov, the top show on Kremlin propaganda TV, wore such glum and downcast expressions that you’d think Vladimir Putin had canceled Christmas. But the subject was “the Syrian question”—the downfall of Bashar al-Assad, who had just arrived in Moscow after his regime had rapidly crumbled before a rebel onslaught. “For Russia, the Syria question is a painfully sensitive one,” Solovyov, whose subdued demeanor was a striking contrast to his usual shouty bravado, said in his opening monologue. “For one thing, our guys have shed blood for that country.”
Having reassured his audience that Russian personnel in the area were safe and acknowledged that the Assad dynasty was out, Solovyov moved on to lessons learned. Such as: “If the people don’t want to fight for their country, no outside forces can help them. If a nation wants freedom, if its people want to fight for themselves, they can be supported. But to take responsibility for a people that doesn’t want that responsibility for itself, that would be a very strange thing to do.” Notice how, in this upside-down version of events, “freedom” would mean keeping Assad’s murderous regime in place.
Solovyov also noted that while he had met and interviewed Assad and “personally found him very likable,” it was obvious that he simply couldn’t keep things under control the way his late father, Hafez al-Assad (who died in 2000), had done. And besides, “What sort of army is that? It was one thing when we working with that army.” The obvious subtext: The ignominious defeat of Russia’s chief ally in the Middle East had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that Russia is currently bogged down in Ukraine and so was unable to lend him a hand.
The same blame deflection was evident in the Kremlin-controlled print media: The daily Vedomosti, for instance, suggested that Assad had become a victim of his own arrogance, refusing to negotiate with the opposition and “labeling everyone he considered undesirable as terrorists.” The irony of Putin’s hacks mocking the habit of labeling political opponents terrorists, a favorite Putin technique, is so thick you could cut it with a knife and serve it in your borscht.
The propagandists also tried to find a silver lining. Solovyov predicted that Israel would have more trouble on its border without Russia’s peacekeeping—and also that, while the West may be “rejoicing” now, nobody knows what states could disintegrate next (maybe even in Europe!).
Meanwhile, the asylum granted Assad and his family in Moscow was spun as a reputational win: “Russia doesn’t abandon its own, unlike the Americans,” observed Solovyov. The same theme was echoed by Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia’s permanent representative to international organizations in Vienna.
Of course, you could say that Putin’s mass-murdering pal wanted help staying in power in Damascus, not chilling out in Moscow. But we can’t always get what we want, right?
MEANWHILE, MOST OF THE RUSSIAN OPPOSITION was watching the collapse of the Assad regime with guarded optimism. “Of course these events are humiliating for Vladimir Putin, since Russia has positioned itself in recent years as a big player, as Bashar Assad’s principal ally,” journalist Ilya Barabanov, now based in Latvia, told the exiled TV station Dozhd. Barabanov pointed out that, humiliation aside, the potential loss of military bases in Syria could put a serious crimp in, if not an end to, Russia’s ambitions to reestablish its influence in Africa. On a stream with Ukrainian journalist Natalya Vlashchenko, expatriate Russian political strategist Stanislav Belkovsky noted that late last year, the Kremlin issued a talking points guide for the tenth anniversary of Russia’s military presence in Syria “explaining why the Kremlin’s Syria campaign was a tremendous success.” Assad’s precipitous fall, Belkovsky said, could be just the sort of “black swan” event that could threaten Putin’s stability as well.
Russian political scientist Vladimir Pastukhov, currently a fellow at University College London, went even further to describe the events in Syria as a “serious and massive defeat” for the Putin regime—less because the Kremlin needs the military bases in Syria so badly than because domestically, Kremlin propaganda had flogged Syria as a symbol of a resurgent Russia’s “global geopolitical influence.” For a large portion of the masses, Pastukhov said, “Putin’s image is that of a winner who knows no defeats”; the collapse of a Russia-backed regime in Syria could greatly dim that aura.
Pastukhov and interviewer Dmitry Yelovsky acknowledged the complexity of the events in Syria and the difficulty of finding good guys in the current conflict; but both agreed that the fall of a brutally repressive authoritarian regime was a thing to cheer. And Pastukhov saw more hopeful symbolism in the end of Assad’s rule: an example of how quickly the forces upholding the power of an authoritarian regime can fold when that regime is threatened. “If trouble starts” in Russia, he predicted, “the Federal Guard Service, the Russian National Guard, the Ministry of Defense—they’re all going to behave exactly like [Assad’s] elite units.”
One can always hope. And one could also add that in such a scenario, Putin might have much more trouble than Assad finding a refuge.
