Kai Elhers — The Ukraine-Syria Complex: What Does Putin Want?

…the often puzzled-over breakup of the former “friendship” between Assad and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdo(ğ)an can be explained here. With the loss being a transit country in Syrian-Iranian pipeline project, Turkey didn’t just lose a lucrative transit operation. They lost out on the possibility of exerting pressure on the EU.

What happened after this situation was created is understandable only in a geopolitical sense. First of all, let’s envision again the current basic situation that can viewed as a juxtapostition of all the three major transformation trends currently happening around the globe: the post-Soviet partitioning of the world, the crisis of the nation state, and the fundamental problem of how we want to live in the future if we’re not subject to the spent “either-or” of socialism OR capitalism.

These three basic trends overlap each other. At the overlap points, alternating knots of conflict are formed which — after they’ve been broken up and used — are generally left unresolved as whole, or they remain as half-frozen deferred conflicts. Only to name the last few: the day before yesterday [it was] Moldova [and] Georgia; yesterday the Ukraine; today Syria and the entire “Crescent.” Maybe tomorrow [it will be] the North Pole, whose territorial claim provides the start [of a new conflict] for those already driving their marked stakes into the ground.

As different as these conflicts are, there’s one constant variable, a common thread that runs through all of them: the containment of Russia as a potential rival for the US, who still sees itself as the only world power. The possible conflict with China, India, and other countries that might connect themselves to Russia is lurking in the background.

Why Russia? It cannot be repeated enough: because Russia is the only country that has, throughout its history, evaded the control and associated exploitation of its resources through the colonial grip of the West — and it continues to this day.

Let’s direct our attention to the Ukraine and Syria. The method is essentially the same in each case. The main message is as follows:

• Russia can no longer remain an empire without the Ukraine.
• Without its alliance with Syria, Russia can only realize the half of its resource-based exports.…

Russia Insider
The Ukraine-Syria Complex: What Does Putin Want?
Kai Elhers
Originally appeared at Hintergrund.
Translated from the German by Susan Neumann