Russia, Distinguishing Itself

"Geopolitics still exists in the 21st century ... Unless you are in NATO, Moscow is near and Washington, D.C., is far away."
"Barefaced lying in the great chamber of the UN Security Council is simple if your opponent does not have concrete proof of your actions, and more importantly, doesn't want concrete proof, in case he or she has to do do something about it."
Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography

There is the geostrategic value to Vladimir Putin of having a deep-water port in the Mediterranean and there is in addition the value to Russia of having been able to re-establish influence in the Middle East. Though his alliance with Syria's Bashar al-Assad in destroying the Sunni Syrian rebellion against Assad's Baathist Alawite rule, in yet another sectarian conflict with the minority Shiite regime governing a Sunni-majority population is no guarantee of stability once the geography is restored in its entirety with the forced expulsion of ISIL, to Assad.

An Su-24 taking off from Hmeimim air base in 2015.

Russian Ministry of Defense

It does, however, in humane terms, stink to high heaven that Putin has aligned himself with a mass murderer and has defended the Syrian regime against irrefutable charges of chemical weapons attacks against vulnerable civilians. But then, Russian warplanes have also engaged in bombing hospitals and schools and apartment buildings in rebel-held parts of Damascus. There is also a kind of social-cultural connection between Russians and Arabs of the Middle East. Both respect force and power. Neither are given to compromise and reasonable accommodation.

Compromise and reasonable accommodation is for losers. They fail to recognize that civilizational mores call out for compromise. To them it represents a failing, an avoidance of hard choices. The West tends to think in terms of sparing human life in contrast to the East which veers toward the sentiment that if sacrifices are to be made for the greater good, it will not be they who make them but their adversaries. This is the logic of tribalism. And it is basically the reason why the Middle East is in perpetual turmoil.

It is also the reason why Russia and Syria are supported by Iran and Iraq and Lebanon's Shiite Hezbollah, the proxy terrorist group devoted to Iranian Shia-ism; sectarian religious devotion to one's own and the compulsion to further that strain of Islam seen as heretical by the vastly dominant Sunni strain. And although Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, non-Arab like Iran, but fundamentally Sunni, and averse to Bashar, is included in that abhorrent company is because he too is a tyrant of violent and impulsive drive.

Russia's penchant for bullying its eastern Europe and Asian co-geographic neighbours has a long tradition, not one honoured by neighbours who were forced to become satellites in greater Russia's dream of firmly loyal hegemony that collapsed under the weight of its Communist dysfunction, but it's still trying. In its zeal to support ethnic Russian Ukrainians revolting against Ukraine, it supplied the rebels with powerful weapons but will never acknowledge its responsibility for the shooting down of the Malaysian Airliner flying over Ukraine in 2014.

Hard to get a real feel which is the worst atrocity, the death of those 298 passengers and crew in their overflight of the conflict area of Flight MH17, or Georgia's loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and Ukraine's loss of Sevastopol and the Crimean Peninsula. Either way, the Kremlin and Putin defied international geopolitical laws and appears entirely indifferent to the criticism and sanctions imposed other than to express frustration and outrage that Russia's internal politics are being interfered with by outside sources.

"Russia found itself in a position it could not retreat from [protecting Russia's Black Sea port]."
"If you compress the spring all the way to its limits, it will snap back."
Russian President Vladimir Putin

Just as Putin has defended the Syrian regime by denying that chlorine gas and sarin have ever been used to destroy the lives of Syrian Sunni civilians, so too does he vehemently deny that Russia has ever embarked on a surreptitious campaign of killing Russian 'traitors' to his regime, where they live in exile abroad. So he has accused the U.K. of themselves producing that military-grade chemical poison and clumsily using as an attempted assassination of the Skripals in Salisbury.

Officers in protective suits prepare to secure the police forensic tent that covers the bench where Sergei Skripal and his daughter were found unconscious in Salisbury, England. (Matt Cardy/Getty Images)