When the G20 states met last year in Australia, Russian President Vladimir Putin walked out early because of the unrelenting criticism of his seizure of the Ukraine, the first military annexation of territory in Europe since Hitler’s Nazi German expansion.
This year in Turkey it has been so very different. Putin has been the center of attention at the G20 summit as Washington and the Europeans sought to woo him to join directly in the military campaign against Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS). Obama and Putin chose to go into a very public huddle in a corner of the summit, while the cameras rolled and clicked. Russian and English language lip readers will have since been very busy watching the footage.
But there is a clear danger that rather a lot of wishful thinking is going on here. Leaders traveled to the Antalya meeting with the news of the Paris massacre still breaking. The sense of shock and outrage inevitably brought them together as they all stood side by side to honor those slain and injured. Moreover, the Russians were about to announce the finding that the Metrojet airliner from Egypt’s Sharm El-Sheikh resort had indeed been brought down over the Sinai by a bomb, as Daesh had claimed from the outset.
But that very public gesture of unity was just that - a very public gesture. Hard-headed political calculation was not abandoned and there are few more hard-headed political calculators than Vladimir and his Kremlin team, dominated as it is by graduates of the FSB intelligence service.
Putin is every bit as responsible as the vacillating Obama for the rise of Daesh in Syria. While the Russian leader doggedly supported the murderous Assad regime, the White House failed to intervene in support of the Free Syrian Army, even when the dictator used poison gas, (which he was no longer supposed to have) against civilians in Damascus. Assad’s survival actually involved cutting deals with Daesh, allowing the terrorists to attack the FSA sure that they would not themselves be hit by the regime’s troops.
When Russian warplanes moved to Syria, the majority of their attacks were on FSA positions, not Daesh. Putin may have said that the civil war can only end with a political solution and hinted that the final form of that solution need not contain Bashar Assad, but these are almost certainly just words designed to keep Moscow’s client regime in place.
The idea that Putin will now line up beside the rest of the civilized world for an almighty assault on Daesh is entirely fanciful. The presence of these terrorists in Iraq in turn justifies the presence of Iranian military in Iraq to help the Shia-dominated government confront them. Iran has become a useful Kremlin ally, not just in helping maintain Assad in power.
The difficulty is that Western leaders want to believe that the Russians, grieving the loss of their airliner and recoiling in disgust at the Paris slaughter, are now suddenly on side. They should recall that Moscow was, at the very least, indirectly involved in the destruction of a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine. The US and Europe should wake up to the reality that the Vladimir Putin they nagged out of the G20 summit last year in Australia, is the selfsame ruthless operator they have been warmly embracing this year in Turkey. Beware the bear.
