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Russian President Vladimir Putin to Focus on Syria at U.N. Vladimir Putin of Russia Calls for Coalition to Fight ISIS
(about 3 hours later)
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is scheduled to address the United Nations General Assembly on Monday for the first time in a decade. Neil MacFarquhar, the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times, looks at what Mr. Putin has been up to recently. UNITED NATIONS — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia called for “a genuinely broad international coalition” to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria on Monday, and dismissed calls for the ouster of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.
In the weeks leading up to the United Nations gathering, Mr. Putin caught the world by surprise by ordering an escalation of Russian military aid to Syria. Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly for the first time in 10 years, Mr. Putin suggested that there be a Security Council resolution to “coordinate” actions against terrorist groups like the Islamic State.
Mr. Putin announced that the delivery of major weapons — including warplanes, helicopter gunships and armored vehicles to the Syrian military, along with more Russian forces — was the first step toward forging a grand international coalition to confront the Islamic State. “We think it’s an enormous mistake to refuse to cooperate with the Syrian government and its armed forces who are valiantly fighting terrorism face to face,” Mr. Putin said. “No one but President Assad’s forces and Kurdish militia are truly fighting the Islamic state and other terrorist organizations inside Syria.”
The basic idea is that the international community should provide the support necessary for ground troops deployed by President Bashar al-Assad and other regional players. Western and other regional governments have emphasized that they want to see Mr. Assad gone. Russia has been a longtime backer of Mr. Assad in Syria, and Moscow has recently bolstered its efforts to support Syrian government forces in their fight against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and other rebel groups seeking to overthrow the Assad regime. Russian military advisers have been dispatched to Syria, and Moscow has increased the number of combat aircraft it has sent to its base near Latakia, Syria.
In what may well be the most intensely watched moment of the General Assembly, the Russian president is supposed to use his appearance, his first there in 10 years, to flesh out his proposal. There is a chance he will outline a specific military strategy, but many analysts expect him to stick to more general themes — like how a single world power has made the world inherently more unstable. Exhibit A: The Middle East. On Sunday, Russia moved to expand its influence in Syria further, and left the United States scrambling, when it announced an intelligence-sharing agreement with Iraq, Syria and Iran to better combat the Islamic State.
There are several reasons Mr. Putin is focused on Syria, both domestically and internationally. At home, Mr. Putin wants to move public attention away from the stalled war in Ukraine as well as mounting economic problems, and above all to present Russia under his watch as returning to its global power status. It was another sign that Mr. Putin is pushing a sharply different approach than the United States in the fight against the Islamic State, one that involves Mr. Assad as a key partner.
On the international front, Russia wants to shore up the beleaguered Assad government, Russia’s main Arab ally. More widely, Mr. Putin seeks to break out of the diplomatic and economic isolation that Washington and other Western governments imposed after Russia annexed Crimea and destabilized Ukraine. (Countries like China and India have continued to interact frequently with the Russian leader.) Mr. Putin’s speech drew a stark contrast with the worldview espoused by President Obama, who addressed the General Assembly more than an hour before the Russian president. The two leaders are scheduled to meet later Monday.
In that sense, Mr. Putin has already successfully leveraged his military aid to Syria into a meeting with a reluctant President Obama on Monday. The Russian leader will be in New York only briefly — he is not scheduled to spend the night. In his speech, Mr. Putin blamed the United State-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 for helping to create the Islamic State, and said that airstrikes against Libya in 2011, authorized by a Security Council resolution in a vote that Russia abstained, further destabilized the Middle East and emboldened radical Islamists.
The Libya campaign is a sore point for the Kremlin, which has criticized the West for using a measure intended to protect civilians as a way to topple Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
“It is now obvious the power vacuum created in some countries of the Middle East and North Africa led to the creation of anarchic areas which immediately started to be filled with extremists and terrorists,” Mr. Putin said.
In his own speech, Mr. Obama acknowledged that the situation in Libya after airstrikes to remove a man he called “a tyrant” was not ideal, and that military forces alone could not bring order in Iraq.