In late September 2015, Russia launched its major foreign campaign since the war in Afghanistan.
Here's my short overview of why it happened and why Moscow continues to care.
A call for a strong power broker that can, if needed, use targeted yet decisive force has been strong in the Middle East for some time. Russia discerned this desire and has been setting the stage to take advantage of it by building up its military presence and launching a diplomatic offensive. A mixture of both legitimate national interests and tactical motives has driven the Russian campaign in Syria.
As an external power, Russia needs regional partners to master its own Islamist challenges in the Caucasus, the Volga region and the Urals, to name a few. Thus, Moscow is in constant pursuit of a balance between a pragmatic foreign policy in the Middle East and its own domestic problems in this regard. Those who believe Russia concocted this narrative as an excuse for intervention must be either dissembling what they know to be true or not well versed on the subject. To be fair, however, Russian officials do occasionally stretch this scenario to turn what might be perceived as a challenge into a “daunting immediate security threat.”
At the regional level, Moscow seeks strongholds in geopolitics, energy deals and arms contracts, which could boost the country’s economy and help it fill in certain market and political niches. Most importantly, Moscow also seeks a coherent structure in the Middle East that would let it cope with its own internal challenges and prevent those problems from slipping into the outside, including Central Asia. That part of Russia’s “southern underbelly” is rarely regarded in the security debate over Syria, but a potential “export of instability” to that region, amid uncertainties about Afghanistan, has long raised severe concerns with Russian decision-makers.
At the global level, Russia’s engagement in the Middle East also reflects its push to secure its status as a world power in politics. It is hard to calculate how much that goal drives its actions, but oblique signs of it can be seen in Moscow’s Syria campaign. Whether such status would be a blessing or a curse is debatable even within Russia, but the need to achieve it is not up for debate in the Kremlin, which is positive it has enough power, ability and will to be seen as an indispensable superpower.
