Pjotr Sauer writes:

The walls of the military office in Aleppo were adorned with pictures of the Kremlin, flanked by Russian and Syrian flags hanging side by side. On the desks, documents detailing the cooperation between the two nations lay abandoned – telltale signs of Bashar al-Assad’s forces’ hasty retreat as rebels closed in on Syria’s second-biggest city over the weekend.

The short clip circulating online was recorded in the office of Russian advisers at Aleppo’s military academy after it was taken by rebels in a surprise offensive. It highlights the escalating threat to the Assad regime and, by extension, to Moscow’s strategic foothold in Syria and the broader region.

Aleppo was the scene of fierce and destructive fighting between 2012 and 2016 when the Syrian civil war was at its height. In 2016, a year after Russian forces joined Assad’s side, the Syrian leader was able to retake the city, forcing the rebels to flee.

At the time, Assad’s capture of Aleppo, after months of relentless aerial bombardment, was widely celebrated in Moscow, with the country’s elite eager to claim credit for the military success.

“There is no question that liberating Aleppo from radical groups … was done with the direct involvement and even a decisive influence of our service personnel,” Vladimir Putin told his defence minister just days after Aleppo fell.

But as Assad’s position becomes more vulnerable, Moscow’s initial success in propping him up, which earned it prestige as a trusted ally, now risks being tarnished.

“The rapid fall of Aleppo and the sheer scale of the offensive that we’ve seen is definitely a reputational blow to Russia,” said Hanna Notte, a Berlin-based expert on Russian foreign policy at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. [Continue reading…]