Putin managed to put US on back-foot – The Financial Times

By Geoff Dyer and Kathrin Hille
Vladimir Putin certainly knows how to steal a show. The Russian president will speak today at the UN General Assembly for the first time in a decade. The rapid build-up of Russian military force in Syria in recent weeks has turned Mr Putin into the centre of attention in New York, as rivals and allies both speculate about his intentions.

To his delight, he has managed to put the US on the back-foot. After a year of trying to freeze out Mr Putin over his military intervention in Ukraine, US President Barack Obama has decided he has little choice but to meet the Russian leader to discuss Syria.
The Russian intervention in Syria — in support of the isolated regime of President Bashar al-Assad — has come at a time when Washington’s own strategy for resolving the conflict is in tatters. The US-trained force of Syrian fighters numbers in the dozens, not the planned thousands, while air strikes have had only a limited impact on the Syrian operations of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, known as ISIS.

Mr Obama, who has done his utmost to stay out of the Syrian civil war, now finds himself facing two potentially perilous choices — either trying to work together with Mr Putin to find a political solution or expanding America’s own involvement in the conflict.

“The military significance [of Russia’s build-up] may still be unclear but the political significance is dramatic,” says James Jeffrey, former US deputy national security adviser and ambassador to Iraq. “Everyone is waiting to see what if anything the US might do.”
Mr Putin will present himself to the international community in New York as a potential solution to the wretched misery of the four-year-old Syrian civil war, which has left more than 300,000 dead, displaced some 11m people and left the Assad regime in control of just one quarter of the country. He will argue the conflict is the product of a decade of irresponsible US policies in the region. Many politicians in Europe, overwhelmed by refugees from Syria, might quietly welcome his intervention, especially as the fighting in eastern Ukraine has entered into at least a temporary lull.
“The approach of the west will change at [the] UNGA because Russia is giving more weapons to the Syrian government, because of the refugee wave and because of the failure of the US policy in the region,” says Veniamin Popov, a former ambassador and Middle East expert at MGIMO, the foreign ministry’s university where most of Russia’s diplomats are trained. “This is only the beginning. The Europeans are telling the US: we can’t do this without the Russians, we can’t defeat this horrible monster [Isis] without them.”
In a short space of time, Mr Putin has effectively built up a surrogate air force for an Assad regime whose own ability to wield air power has been significantly depleted. Western intelligence officials estimate that Russia now has at least 28 Sukhoi fighters in Syria, including jets with air-to-air combat capability and ground attack aircraft, plus at least two dozen attack helicopters. The US government has said Russian equipment also includes ground-to-air missiles, weapons that Moscow argues it needs to defend forward bases.
Using satellite images, analysts believe construction is under way at two further military facilities at Istamo and al-Sanobar, both near Latakia, and Russia is refurbishing and strengthening its naval base at Tartus. Although the newly-arrived Russian contingent does not appear to have conducted combat operations yet, analysts believe it has the capacity to launch attacks against Isis or some of the other Islamist groups involved in direct fighting against the Assad regime.

Two Russians briefed on the matter told the FT last week that Moscow planned to send about 2,000 military personnel to Syria in the first phase of its build-up mainly to equip, run and secure the air base it is building near the port city of Latakia.
“Apparently, these forces are largely already in Syria,” says Mikhail Barabanov, editor-in-chief of Moscow Defense Brief, a magazine specialising in the Russian military. “This number does not involve the deployment of any large ground forces.” US officials think it much less likely that Russian forces would be involved in ground operations, in part because of the risk of a domestic backlash at the inevitable casualties.