Not quite all Putin had hoped

President Vladimir Putin’s military adventure in Syria has boosted Russia’s global influence, but it hasn’t delivered everything he wanted, said Vladimir Frolov. Russian airpower “has indeed changed the trajectory of the war” and allowed our ally Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to consolidate control over most of western Syria. And the Syrian ceasefire deal agreed to by the U.S. and Russia in February “perfectly reflects Moscow’s traditional vision for such settlements—the two superpowers dictating terms to their proxies.” But Putin had hoped to achieve so much more from his intervention. His real goal was “to revive the bipolar format of Russian-U.S. cooperation and rivalry for influence that existed during the Cold War,” and that mission remains incomplete. The U.S., for example, shows no inclination to solve the war in Ukraine or any other conflict through bilateral talks with Russia. Nor will the U.S. view Russia as an equal until the Kremlin stops seeing everything as a zero-sum game in which a win for the U.S. must be a loss for Russia. Right now, Russia has been “gaining leverage by making itself first part of the problem” and then magnanimously removing itself again. A bilateral world won’t come about unless Russia is willing to start “jointly developing solutions.”