Souvenirs shop, Damascus, April 2016. Hassan Ammar/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.The assaults on rebel-held districts of Aleppo by Russian and Syrian government forces have been deadly, not least the targeting of hospitals. These have earned strong criticism from United Nations staff as well as western governments. In the case of Washington, such criticism can all too easily seem hypocritical in the wider context of the United States-led war on ISIS which has led to at least 30,000 of the movement's supporters being killed in Iraq and Syria. Civilian casualties, according to Airwars, are over 1,600. The same judgment applies to Britain with its arming of Saudi Arabia as that state continues to wage its hugely damaging war in Yemen.
In Syria, the breakdown of talks between the respective foreign ministers John Kerry and Sergey Lavrov is a serious development. Without re-engagement there appears little hope of any new ceasefire agreement. Lavrov’s suggestion of a two-day pause in the attacks, however, may indicate that some inside the Kremlin are beginning to worry that events in Syria may slip out of control. This, in turn, raises the question of what motivates Vladimir Putin in his support of Bashar al-Assad's regime. This can best be understood in terms of Russia's experience since the late Soviet era, before the end of the cold war in 1989-90.
The Russian context
In the early 1980s, during a particularly dangerous period of east-west confrontation, the Soviet Union underwent three leadership crises in quick succession. The death of Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982 was followed by that of his successor, Yuri Andropov, in February 1984, whose own successor Konstantin Chernenko was already ill and died in March 1985. Thus did Mikhail Gorbachev come to inherit a state in trouble: a quasi-empire of disparate countries, unable remotely to match Nato in its defence spending, and embroiled in an unwinnable war in Afghanistan.
