When Bashar al-Assad last week scuttled to Moscow he finally exploded the myth of Vladimir Putin’s strategic genius. He showed how comically wrong it is of so many in the West to believe that the Russian leader possesses some invincible martial prowess.
And he made his Kremlin patron look a total fool.
The Syrian tyrant was not merely Putin’s poodle. For the past ten years he has been used as living proof that Russia was a force to be reckoned with, a great power that was able to keep Assad enthroned in Damascus – when the entire Western world was plaintively and abortively calling for him to go.
As long as the Syrian tyrant was there, he was the global symbol of Putin’s willingness to stand by his allies, through thick and thin, no matter how evil their behaviour. Well, today all those Kremlin boasts look ridiculous, and so does Putin.
Assad has been toppled by a ragtag-and-bobtail collection of hirsute guerrillas, and for all the firepower of Russian forces in Syria, they were powerless to help. Sure, the Russians did their best. Their planes got up in the air, and they bombed some Syrians, as they have done so many times before and with such disgusting ferocity.
This time it made no difference. Mr and Mrs B. Assad are now trying to work the heating system in an anonymous snow-covered dacha outside Moscow, and Putin’s vaunted position in Syria has collapsed.
His ships have fled his naval base at Tartus; his planes have flown from the Khmeimim airfield – the Russian facility that he opened with such neo-colonial fanfare in 2017. Will the new Syrian government eventually decide to honour the 49-year lease that Assad signed with Putin?
Why the hell should they? Today in Syria the jails and torture chambers are being opened, and families are slowly discovering the truth about the hundreds of thousands who disappeared during the reign of Assad.
Armed rebels waving independence-era flags in Syria this week after the fall of Bashar al-Assad
As the stories emerge, the Syrians today know that every one of those victims was brutalised by a man that Putin protected and that Putin kept in power.
They know the devilish cunning of the Russian-Syrian alliance: how Assad murdered the innocent, but also released some of the worst jihadis from jail and how, with Putin’s connivance, he effectively created the phenomenon of Isis or Daesh: so that he could point rhetorically to the contrast between the apparent secular stability of his government in Damascus – propped up by Russia – and the Islamist horror of the caliphate.
The Syrian people remember that period. They know all about Putin’s cynicism, and that he wasn’t remotely interested in them or their wellbeing, but only in Russian power, and Russian ability to make mischief.
So no, I don’t think Putin will find it easy to maintain his only warm water port, or to continue to use Syria as his forward base for operations elsewhere. And of course his humiliation is far worse than that.
The end of Assad has sent a tremor up the spine of every Putin-backed dictator in Africa – and there are now quite a few – because the lesson is clear. You think the Russians will stick with you, my friend; you think they will keep supplying you with weapons and mercenaries, no questions asked.
Be warned. One day they will rat you out, just as they ratted on Assad, because they have no real interest in the sufferings of Africa – only in exploiting those conflicts to undermine the West.
The Russians will eventually cut those dictators loose, because Putin is now severely overstretched, and for the first time since 2014 the Russian programme of aggression is going into reverse. And for that – for finally standing up to Putin – we must thank, of course, the heroic people of Ukraine.
It is the magnificent three years of Ukrainian resistance that is enfeebling Putin around the world. So enough of the nonsense, please, about Putin’s inevitable victory.
Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with Assad at the Kremlin in Moscow in July this year
His forces may be grinding on, but they still haven’t captured the allegedly key town of Pokrovsk after six months of trying, and the Russian casualties are so enormous that he has been driven to recruiting bashi-bazook cannon-fodder from North Korea, even Yemen.
He has to pay huge bounties to persuade Russians to fight, and with interest rates at 21 per cent his economic difficulties are deepening every day. So this is the moment to be strong, and when people talk of a ‘deal’ to end the war, we must remember how it started.
This was a war that simply did not need to happen. As things stood, back in 2022, Ukraine presented no conceivable military threat to Russia. As things stood then, they would never have been allowed to join Nato – because many countries would have argued, then, that this was an unnecessary provocation to Russia.
In so far as that was the case against Ukrainian Nato membership, Putin has comprehensively demolished it. He and he alone chose to make war – largely as a distraction from his domestic failings.
It follows that he alone is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians. Their blood is on his hands.
Ukraine is now like Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states, Finland – all of whom have been savagely invaded by Russia in the past century, and who therefore have required and been granted Nato protection.
We must do the same for Ukraine. There is no other long-term solution. The best way to deal with Putin is not to cower, not to cringe, but to stand up to him, and to strengthen Ukraine with all the military and financial support they need.
It is time to take the frozen $300 billion (£238 billion) of Russian assets, and allow the Ukrainians to use the cash, not least to pay back the Americans. With the arrival next month of Donald Trump in the White House, and the obvious weakness of Putin, the stars are suddenly in alignment to bring this nightmare war to an end.
I have seen how Trump was tougher on Putin, and more helpful to the Ukrainians, than his Democrat predecessors. He gave them, for instance, the Javelin missiles that were so crucial in the defence of Kyiv.
I believe he understands profoundly that the only ‘deal’ that will work is one that protects a free, sovereign and independent Ukraine. Since Putin will struggle bitterly to prevent that outcome, the only way to peace is through strength.
Trump can bring peace by simply showing Putin that he has lost the argument: that Ukraine’s destiny is with the West, and with Western security guarantees. He can use Russian money to pay for it, and he doesn’t have to commit a single American soldier. All it takes is the courage and decisiveness he so manifestly possesses.
So let’s silence the simpering hogwash of those who say Putin is ‘invincible’. He isn’t. The Ukrainians have proved it, and so have the Syrians.
Like all paper tigers, Putin will eventually fold in Ukraine, as he has folded in Syria. All the world needs is the right person to have the guts to stand up to him – and that man is Donald Trump.
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