So Russia’s intervention, in retrospect, tilted the balance. From 2013 to 2015, there was more or less a stalemate. You had Iran and Hezbollah intervene on the side of the Syrian regime, and that had stopped the rebels’ momentum by 2013. Really, the two sides had been entrenched. Well, at that point, in 2015, the conflict was a stalemate. When Putin’s intervention in Syria started, in 2015, what was the state of the Syrian conflict, and what did you initially view as the Russian aims? During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed Russian military strategy, why Ukraine has proved more difficult for Russian forces than Syria, and what the Syrian intervention suggests about how Putin sees Russia’s place in the world. I recently spoke with my colleague Anand Gopal, a contributing writer at The New Yorker, who has written extensively about the Syrian civil war for the magazine and elsewhere, and is currently at work on a book about the conflict. The intervention also offers clues to how Putin wants to wield military power abroad, as has been seen in the last several weeks in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Last year, the group Airwars estimated that the Russian intervention had killed tens of thousands of civilians the United Nations has accused Russia of war crimes. But the Russian military effort helped turn the war decisively in Assad’s direction. By then, the Russian government had already provided weapons to the Syrian state, which had become infamous for horrific human-rights violations. In September, 2015, President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian military to intervene on behalf of the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, who was in the fifth year of waging a brutal civil war against domestic opposition and overseas recruits.
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