FT article about Syria being the Russian template for cruelty, destruction and framing the conflict in Ukraine. "In Russian myth, cruelty is a badge of honour, an end in itself."
I have copied the article below as FT is behind a paywall.
https://www.ft.com/content/02106f28-0b7d-4684-8579-9973c33ea3ca
Russia’s myth-making in Syria was a template for the horrors in Ukraine
Moscow’s support for Assad is a precedent for its scorched-earth strategy against Kyiv
At first glance, the long-rumbling Syrian conflict and the front-page war in Ukraine have little in common. The former is a multi-sided civil war fought in the Middle East, while the latter is a contest between states at the gates of Europe. But Russia broods over both these seemingly distinct battlefields.
Vladimir Putin’s war in Syria began as a trickle of weapons and advisers to the Damascus regime before a full-scale intervention in 2015. Moscow’s air power probably saved Bashar al-Assad. So Syria offers a cautionary tale for what happens when Russia not only wins the war but fashions the lens through which we see the peace: a template for its strategy in Ukraine.
The implications of Assad winning the Syrian war were always clear. A Kremlin-allied government in Damascus; a long-term Russian military presence in the eastern Mediterranean; and a narrative, fed to Russians at home, that Moscow had bested Washington in a critical battleground of the new cold war. This involved tactics that have become chillingly familiar. During the second Chechen war, the Russian military flattened the capital of Grozny. The UN in 2003 called the city the “most destroyed . . . on earth”. In Syria, Aleppo shared a similar fate. Ukrainian cities including Mariupol, Kherson and Bakhmut now bear similar scars.
In Syria, Moscow created a foundational myth, twisting the war’s history to serve its own ends and justify its brutal military campaign. It claims the civil war was a contest between Assad and violent Salafi jihadism — an elegant lie that draws selectively on elements of truth while ignoring the complexity of the conflict. In this telling, Assad was a besieged leader of a multi-ethnic, religiously diverse country threatened by Islamic radicals backed by the US and its Arab neighbours. The fact that the Syrian regime is responsible for the majority of the deaths, disappearances and economic ruin is conveniently reframed by Russian state media as a necessary response to terrorism, rather than an amoral effort to subjugate its opponents.
The historian Timothy Snyder charts how Putin and his advisers built a system sustained by conflict and a view of the west as an existential threat. Syria and Ukraine are battlegrounds, but the risk from Russian myths travels much farther afield.
First, the Kremlin’s telling of the Syrian conflict erases the individual and focuses on ideology. Here, there were no protesters, no civil opposition, only terrorism. Russia has vilified the Syrian Civil Defence, known as the White Helmets, as a “tool used by the west to carry out provocations”. The hopeful dawn of the 2011 uprising — when hundreds of thousands of Syrians took to the streets to demand freedom — has been vacuumed from history. There are no individual Syrians, only the Syrian people, who, of course, support Assad and Putin.
A similar narrative devised for Ukraine suggests that Russians are fighting Nazis. In a <a class="break-all" href="https://12ft.io/proxy?ref=&q=www.ft.com/content/b403898a-0dfb-41b3-a8c6-a53866ff0859" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">long essay published months before the invasion, Putin claimed that Ukrainians, Russians and Belarusians were one people under Moscow’s authority. Thus any Ukrainian who resists Moscow is an enemy, a traitor, a Nazi collaborator.
Second, Russia’s Syria myth turns actual events on their heads, distorting the truth and wrecking critical thinking. An analysis of Russian air power in Syria in 2015-16 shows that Moscow began its Syria campaign by targeting not Islamic State, as it claimed, but the anti-Assad rebels around Aleppo and Damascus. Russia and its allies have spun similar lies about the use of chemical weapons in Syria, claiming that attacks conducted by the regime were either faked or the work of the opposition.
The destruction of truth continues in Ukraine. A Russian air strike on a theatre in Mariupol, which killed about 600 people, was spun by the Kremlin as the work of a Ukrainian military unit with roots in a far-right militia. Moscow similarly claimed that the killing of hundreds of Ukrainian civilians in Bucha had been faked by Ukrainian saboteurs.
Third, in Russian myth, cruelty is a badge of honour, an end in itself. In Syria, the regime’s supporters were fond of painting the slogan “Assad or we burn the country” across the pockmarked walls of emptied towns and neighbourhoods. The goal became the suffering of others, the country a sacrifice for Assad. The same dynamic is at work in Ukraine. In a Levada Center poll conducted in December, 59 per cent of Russian citizens claimed to feel no responsibility for the deaths of Ukrainian civilians. Leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is closely aligned with Putin, have framed the war in religious terms, claiming that the sacrifice of Russian soldiers will cleanse them of their sins.
The Kremlin’s narrative on Syria and Ukraine offers a dark warning, a vision of the threat posed by russkaya pravda, Russian truth. To us — and to Syrians and Ukrainians — falls the burden of resistance.