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In Russia, John Kerry Pushes Forward on Syria Talks In Russia, John Kerry Pushes Forward on Syria Talks
(34 minutes later)
MOSCOW — Secretary of State John Kerry pressed ahead on Tuesday with a push for a new round of talks on the Syrian peace process in meetings in the red-carpeted, chandeliered halls of the Kremlin that are sure to outrage critics of diplomatic engagement with Russia. BEIRUT, Lebanon — Eleven weeks after Moscow launched its first airstrikes in Syria, the scream of Russian warplanes have become so familiar in rebel-held areas that even children recognize them. But the military map of the conflict has changed little, and the Kremlin’s forces have become another set of players in a civil war that seems to defy solution.
In Moscow after an extended trip to Paris for climate talks, Mr. Kerry met first with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, and left directly to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin in the evening. The day of meetings was intended to smooth differences over a planned round of negotiations scheduled to take place in New York on Friday. While the air campaign, begun in a burst of enthusiasm on Sept. 30, has blunted rebel advances, it has had minimal effect on the jihadists of the Islamic State, the declared target, and it has made an already dire humanitarian crisis even worse.
“Foreign Minister Lavrov and I have agreed that together, the United States and Russia have an ability to be able to make a significant difference here,” Mr. Kerry said to the Russian leader before their talk. “So I very much look forward to our discussions now and appreciate the seriousness of your commitment of time and thought about these issues.” Instead, the campaign’s greatest effects may have been on the political fortunes of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, who has leveraged Russia’s intervention to make himself a necessary interlocutor in efforts to end the Syrian civil war.
Perhaps the major sticking point is deciding which groups should speak for the Syrian opposition. Before the visit, Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lavrov had agreed in a telephone call that the makeup of a Syrian opposition delegation to the New York talks should be acceptable to all parties, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. Yet his gambit in Syria is proving to be a double-edged sword. It has come at great expense: in Russian lives, resources, a dangerous clash with Turkey and other costs that could grow significantly in the months ahead. Russia, like the United States, has found that airpower alone has done relatively little to shift the status quo on the ground, leaving it dependent on the distant hope that a political process can find a way out.
The two countries should also agree on a list of groups they deem to be terrorist organizations fighting in Syria, the statement said. For now, as the United States pushes for new peace talks between the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad and the opposition, everyone involved realizes that Mr. Putin’s cooperation has become essential, though not necessarily a guarantee of success.
However, a senior State Department official told journalists traveling with Mr. Kerry that gaps remained with Russia on setting the ground rules for the New York talks. It was unclear, for example, whether the talks might go ahead even if Russia, a backer of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, rejects the makeup of the opposition delegation, the official said. “With this military escalation, the Russians have put themselves back at the center of the Syrian equation and at the forefront of the diplomatic stage,” said Noah Bonsey, a Syria analyst with the International Crisis Group, “But on the ground, returns on their military investment have proven limited and are unlikely to improve.”
Mr. Kerry has made finding a political resolution to Syria’s fierce and festering civil war a priority for defeating the Islamic State terrorist group, which has found a haven in Sunni Muslim regions of eastern Syria and western Iraq. Frederic C. Hof, a former State Department official for Syria in the Obama administration and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said “what matters is ground power, and that is where we have not seen anything terribly significant in the regime-Russian combination so far.”
Mr. Kerry and Victoria J. Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, took part in the talks in Moscow on Tuesday. On Monday, the European Union delayed a decision on whether to renew its sanctions against Russia, as cracks appear in the once-unified support for punitive measures against Mr. Putin. Secretary of State John Kerry was in Moscow on Tuesday, as well, seeking to narrow the gaps with Mr. Putin so that new peace talks on Syria can be scheduled for early next year.
The United States, Russia, the European Union and Middle Eastern countries had agreed in Vienna in November on a timeline of two years to hold new elections in Syria but left unsettled the main question of the fate of Mr. Assad. But Mr. Putin has paid a price for this improvement in his diplomatic standing, and is likely to soon feel just as pressured as President Obama and European leaders to find a political solution to the Syrian conflict.
The senior State Department official, who asked not to be identified discussing the behind-the-scenes diplomacy of the secretary’s trip, said the talks Tuesday would try to clarify what role Mr. Assad would have in a transition government, a pivotal sticking point in any negotiated settlement. As it struggles economically because of low oil prices and international sanctions, the last thing Russia needs is a quagmire requiring continued investment while possibly souring the mood at home and fraying relations with other countries.
Russia began airstrikes in Syria in September after a covert military buildup over the summer, in an operation to prop up Mr. Assad and break Russia’s two-year-old diplomatic isolation over the Ukraine crisis. Already, Russia has seen hundreds of citizens killed in the terrorist bombing of an airliner as it left the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, and relations with Turkey were ruptured after Turkish fighter jets shot down a Russian warplane. In addition to the loss of life, the disasters cut the Russian public off from their two favorite and most affordable vacation spots, just as they are beginning to feel the pinch of inflation.
While the airstrikes in Syria have not, for now, done much to strengthen Mr. Assad’s sphere of control or leverage in any eventual talks, they have rendered Russia an indispensable player in the Syrian crisis. And there remains the possibility of blowback by Russian-speaking jihadists, thousands of whom have joined the ranks of ISIS and could seek to return home to carry out attacks.
Mr. Kerry’s meeting with Mr. Putin in the Kremlin on Tuesday will be the second such sit-down since a meeting in May in Sochi, Russia, when Mr. Kerry broke the ice that had frozen relations after the Ukraine crisis. Since then, President Obama has met face to face with Mr. Putin three times. So while it remains true that the United States and Europe need Mr. Putin to deal with troubles around the world, in Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, it is becoming increasingly clear that Mr. Putin might need their help, too.
“The Russian elite, the Kremlin, is very interested in restoring normal relations with Washington, even despite the obvious lack of personal chemistry between Obama and Putin,” Viktor I. Mizin, a political scientist at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, said in a telephone interview. Mr. Kerry met for nearly four hours on Tuesday evening with Mr. Putin in the Kremlin, in talks intended to smooth differences over a planned round of Syria negotiations set to take place in New York on Friday.
The optics of the meetings Tuesday certainly seemed to advance this Russian goal. Among the issues to be decided in the run-up to the proposed talks is which of the dozens of militias fighting in Syria should speak for the Syrian opposition, and which should be designated terrorist organizations.
The senior State Department official, however, said the United States would cut no substantial deals lifting sanctions against Russia over Ukraine for a solution in Syria. The United States, Mr. Kerry said, was not seeking Mr. Assad’s ouster per se, but rather considers it unlikely he can preside over a successful settlement.
“We have made absolutely clear,” the official told journalists before Mr. Kerry’s meetings in Moscow, “all the way through this at every level from the president on down, that we are not playing let’s make a deal here, trading Ukraine for Syria, that these are distinct issues with distinct paths forward.” Moscow said at the start that it was going after the Islamic State, which controls territory in eastern Syria and in Iraq. But instead it has mostly bombed rebel forces in the country’s northwest, near the threatened stronghold of Mr. Assad and his Alawite sect, leading many to conclude that its primary goal is to sustain his rule.
In some areas, like near the government-held coastal enclave of Latakia, Russian air support has helped stop rebel advances. And south of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, government forces have gained territory, although most of it is sparsely populated.
Perhaps the government’s greatest achievement since the Russian airstrikes began was to break the siege by Islamic State fighters of the Kweiras military air base near Aleppo. But even that is unlikely to greatly affect the course of the wider war.
In rebel-held territory, the Russian campaign has added a new level of terror, creating a fresh wave of civilian refugees and damaging critical infrastructure, according to opposition activists and international monitors.
“The Russian bombing is worse than that by the regime,” said Shadi al-Owaini, an anti-government activist in northwestern Syria whose office was recently destroyed by what he thinks was a Russian bomb.
Residents of opposition areas had grown accustomed to attacks by the Syrian government, but the Russian airstrikes have proved to be more accurate and destructive, Mr. Owaini said.
So many have fled that some villages are now nearly empty, and those who stay avoid unnecessary movements. “In the past, I used to drive my car around,” he said. “Nowadays, no way, we will be bombed immediately.”
Russian jets have also targeted supply lines that connect rebel areas with Turkey and infrastructure like water treatment plants, international monitors say. A strike believed to have been carried out by a Russian warplane took place at a fuel market in Idlib Province on Tuesday, destroying tanker trucks, setting huge fires and killing 16 people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict from Britain through contacts in Syria.
Yet for all that, analysts say, the strikes have yet to lead to major shifts in the front lines that divide the country.
Aron Lund, the editor of the Syria in Crisis blog published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the Russian strikes could eventually have a cumulative effect by exhausting rebels and damaging their bases and infrastructure.
So far, he said, their concrete effects have been few. “Given the level of investment this represents for the Russians and the fact that you can only cross this boundary once, the regime and the Russians must have hoped for more radical change.”
Like the United States in its entanglement with ISIS, Russia is relearning the old lesson that no matter how damaging, airstrikes can accomplish little in the absence of reliable ground forces to take and hold territory.
After nearly five years of conflict, Assad forces are exhausted and lacking the manpower to gain significant ground.
For now, at least, the United States is pressing for Russian cooperation on peace talks. While Russia has agreed in principle to push for talks, it dismisses most of the Syrian opposition as terrorists and it remains unclear if it will agree to talks with a new opposition body formed in Saudi Arabia this month. Also unclear is if Russia will agree to the departure of Mr. Assad in some transitional process — a condition the opposition insists on.
But if there is little change on the battlefield, Mr. Putin’s resistance may begin to dwindle.