​Could the tide be turning against Putin?

The momentous events in Syria that culminated in the toppling of President Bashar al-Assad earlier this month may come to be seen as a turning point in Russia’s war in Ukraine. 

It seems all too fitting that Assad should flee to Moscow, to be welcomed by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and granted asylum. The two men have much in common. They came to power within weeks of one another, both anointed by their predecessors. Assad assumed the presidency in July 2000 on the death of his father, the brutal dictator Hafez al-Assad, while Putin was nominated by the increasingly drunken and shambolic former president Boris Yeltsin as his successor at the turn of the millennium. He went on to win a snap election in March 2000, formally taking office in May that year.

A quarter of a century ago, both men represented a great new hope for their respective countries. Assad was young, Western-educated and charming. Many expected him to make a decisive break from the violent and repressive autocracy of his father. Putin’s accession to the presidency also marked a dramatic shift from the chaotic Yeltsin years. Then US president George W Bush famously said, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy…I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

But the Western politicians and diplomats couldn’t have got it more wrong. Assad and Putin have presided over two of the harshest totalitarian states of our era, marked by strict repression, human rights abuses, and imprisonment or murder of opponents.

The two dictators cemented their alliance during Syria’s civil war. Putin came to Assad’s aid when the latter’s grip on power was hanging by a thread, launching thousands of Russian air strikes in 2015-2016 that wreaked havoc on opposition strongholds, in particular Aleppo, which was bombed to smithereens. Mile after mile of Syria’s second biggest city was razed to the ground, leaving nothing but rubble, twisted metal and shattered remnants of people’s lives – a strategy Putin would later repeat in Mariupol and elsewhere in Ukraine. Russia’s intervention in Syria was instrumental in turning the tide back in Assad’s favour.

The fall of Assad’s regime casts doubt on the future of Russia’s naval base at Tartus, a key strategic deepwater port on the eastern Mediterranean, and its nearby airbase at Hmeimim. Russian naval vessels have already moved away from their base. What’s more, Russia’s failure to prevent the fall from power one of its key allies serves to dampen Moscow’s prestige in parts of the world, most notably the Sahel region of Africa, where Putin has sought to gain influence and control of natural resources.

But most worrying of all for Putin, the swiftness of the rebel advance in Syria proves that longstanding autocratic leaders can be toppled, including when they least expect it. Even though it failed, the march on Moscow by Putin’s former friend Yevgeny Prigozhin in June 2023 – often referred to as an attempted coup – indicates that Russia is not immune to such sudden reversals. It’s well known that Putin is prone to paranoia and he must now be seeing shadows lurking in every corner of the Kremlin.

There are other signs too, that Putin isn’t getting things all his own way. Meddling in the elections of other countries is one of Russia’s tried and tested methods of gaining influence and fomenting opposition to the West, including using Russian bots to flood social media platforms with anti-Western commentary and disinformation. But neighbouring democracies have got wise to Moscow’s tactics and started fighting back.

Last month a referendum in Moldova on including a desire for EU membership in the country’s constitution passed by a far narrower margin than expected, allegedly because of a surge in Russian-sponsored interference. Moldova issued a formal protest to its Russian ambassador, accusing Moscow of organising ineligible voting, bribery, and security threats in a bid to influence the vote.

In Georgia, opposition groups accuse the pro-Russian Georgian Dream party of rigging the vote and stealing October’s parliamentary elections, plunging the country into turmoil. Mass protests reminiscent of Ukraine’s Euromaidan movement of 2013-14 have continued since late November following a decision to delay EU accession talks, further reignited by the appointment of a vehemently anti-Western president.

And most recently, and most dramatically of all, Romania has annulled the result of its 24 November first round presidential election vote, which was won by Calin Georgescu, an almost unknown far-right Putin sympathiser. Romania’s constitutional court took the unprecedented step of cancelling the election after intelligence concluded that Georgescu had benefitted from a mass influence operation conducted on TikTok, allegedly orchestrated from Russia.

As well as declining influence in its near abroad, signs are beginning to emerge of discontent at home as the Russian economy sags under the pressure of nearly three years of war. Galloping military spending and labour shortages have sent inflation soaring, creating a cost-of-living crisis far eclipsing anything we have experienced in the West. Butter prices have risen by 30% this year and supermarkets now keep it in locked cabinets to prevent people from stealing it to resell on the black market.

Spiralling interest rates and sharp falls in the rouble’s value are further eroding spending power for consumers, and the effects of US and European sanctions are finally beginning to bite. Having defied the West with its resilience for the last three years, Russia’s economic growth is dropping sharply and leading even the hardy and complacent Russian populace to question its government’s priorities.

These reversals in Moscow's fortunes are not yet enough to affect the situation on the battlefield, where Russia remains on the ascendancy. Its army continues its slow, grinding offensives into Ukrainian territory in the Donbas, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions and around Kharkiv, as well as taking back inch by inch (with the help of North Korean troops) the Russian territory in Kursk region that it lost to Ukraine in the summer.

But Russian progress is painfully slow-moving and comes at an ever-greater price. November’s military losses were the highest since the start of the war, with more than 45,000 Russians killed or seriously wounded over the course of the month. Even by Russian meat-grinder standards, the figures are truly staggering. On 28 November alone, Russian casualties numbered 2,030. Compare this with the Soviet Union's war in Afghanistan in the 1980s when approximately 15,000 Russian soldiers were killed in nearly a decade of fighting.

It is no coincidence that Russia’s war losses have soared since Donald Trump’s presidential election victory in the US. Trump famously boasted on the campaign trail that he would “end the war in 24 hours”, prompting Putin to redouble his efforts and throw the kitchen sink at his war effort, desperate to put Russia in as strong a position as possible ahead of expected peace negotiations when Trump comes to power.
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In contrast, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has initiated a charm offensive with Trump, signalling a willingness to compromise and discussing possible scenarios for ending hostilities. And the initial signs indicate that his tactics may be working. Following a meeting with Zelensky in Paris, the mood music in the Trump camp may be shifting slightly in Ukraine’s favour.

​Everyone knows that Trump loves to make a deal and that he can’t stand losers. If he can be persuaded that backing Putin – who he has previously referred to as a friend – would be the equivalent of a great big L on the forehead, Trump may just throw himself decisively behind Zelensky and enable the Ukrainians to reverse some of Russia’s gains on the battlefield and negotiate a peace deal on favourable terms. Maybe, just maybe, the tide is starting to turn.

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