Ishaan Tharoor writes:

As the war drags on, the parallels deepen. The Russian invasion has already spawned an enormous refugee crisis, hollowed out many Ukrainian cities and towns, and led to the suffering of countless Ukrainian civilians. The conflict, a growing body of analysts contend, ought to be seen in a continuum with Russia’s 2015 intervention in the Syrian civil war, which played a key role in turning the tide of battle in favor of embattled Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad.

The ruthless tactics and bombing campaigns that Russia unfurled across the Middle Eastern nation served as something of a trial run for the Russian war effort in Ukraine. And, in less than two months, the battles are producing effects on the ground that are tragically familiar to anyone who experienced or watched Syria’s decade-long implosion.

“Look at the city of Mariupol,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told an international forum last month, likening the besieged, ruined coastal city to a war-ravaged metropolis in Syria. “This is exactly what we’ve seen in the city of Aleppo.”

Zelensky’s putative foes found their own metaphors, too. When Russia’s massed troops poured across Ukraine’s borders in late February, Assad himself piped up. He equated the “terrorists” that Russia helped subdue in Syria — never mind that one estimate by a watchdog group claims Russian airstrikes killed as many as 25,000 civilians in Syria since 2015 — to the “Nazis” the Kremlin sought to defeat in Ukraine. Assad described the invasion as a necessary “correction of history and [a] rebalance to the world … lost after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.” [Continue reading…]