Russia redeploys from Ukraine to Syria: report
Thomas Grove
The Wall Street Journal
October 24, 2015 5:16PM
Russian ground staff work on a Sukhoi Su-34 fighter at the Hmeymim base near Latakia, Syria, in this Russian Defence Ministry picture. Source: Reuters
Russia has sent a few dozen special-operations troops to Syria in recent weeks, Russian and Western officials say, redeploying the elite units from Ukraine as the Kremlin shifts its focus to supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Washington and Moscow began critical talks on the future of Syria on Friday as rebels fighting the Assad regime said that they were successfully resisting a Russian-backed offensive in the north of the country.
John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart, and the foreign ministers of Turkey and Saudi Arabia met in Vienna on Friday amid hopes for a new diplomatic effort. The Russian initiative comes after a visit this week to Moscow by President Assad.
“I am convinced … that today’s meeting was constructive and productive,” Mr Kerry said, announcing a further round of talks.
Russia in late September launched a campaign of air strikes in support of Mr Assad’s government, and President Vladimir Putin has said Russian troops will not play a role in ground combat.
But Russian military experts and officials say small numbers of special-forces units — whose missions are rarely acknowledged publicly — are also on the ground in Syria.
“The special forces were pulled out of Ukraine and sent to Syria,“ a Russian Ministry of Defense official said, adding that they had been serving in territories in eastern Ukraine held by pro-Russia rebels.
The official described them as “akin to a Delta Force”, the US Army’s elite counter-terrorism unit.
A senior Western official also said a contingent of elite Russian forces was on the ground in Syria from eastern Ukraine. A US defence official said one of their roles is to provide coordination between Syrian troops and Russian aircraft conducting air strikes in support of the regime’s ground offensive.
“The Russians are operating very closely with Syrian units,” the defence official said.
Russia’s Defence Ministry declined to comment on the claims. It has said that some of its military specialists are helping to advise and train Syrian government forces on the Russian-made hardware they are getting.
A Sukhoi Su-24 fighter jet takes off from the Hmeymim air base near Latakia, Syria, in this Russian picture.
The Kremlin has long denied that its military forces, including special-operations troops, have been deployed in eastern Ukraine — as US and other Western military officials have asserted.
But after the annexation of the Ukrainian region of Crimea last year, Mr Putin acknowledged that Russian special-operations troops in unmarked uniforms, who became known as “little green men,” had helped secure the peninsula.
“There certainly are ‘little green men’ in Syria,” the US defence official said.
The Russian ministry official said the assets sent to Syria in recent weeks include the Zaslon unit, trained to protect diplomatic assets and personnel. Nearly two dozen Russian military-intelligence officers are also on site to liaise with Mr Assad’s military intelligence, the official said.
Robert Lee, a visiting scholar at Moscow-based defence industry think tank CAST, said boots on the ground could also improve the accuracy of air strikes.
“The use of forward ground troops to draw fire from enemy positions makes the use of air power much more effective,” he said.
Russian air force technicians attach a bomb to a war plane at the Latakia base.
Moscow has a longstanding military relationship with Damascus, and some Russian special forces were present in Syria even before the air campaign began on September 30. Those were concentrated near Tartus where Russia has a naval installation.
One of the Russian objectives in Syria appears to be to showcase Russian military capabilities, such as with the recent launch of cruise missiles from ships in the Caspian Sea.
“That was the first time we’ve seen those used operationally,” the US defence official said. From a tactical perspective, the launch made little sense as Russia could have struck the same targets more efficiently, and more cheaply, by aircraft already deployed in Syria.
There are potential pitfalls from putting Russia’s newly modernised military on display, however; Pentagon officials said that some of the Russian cruise missiles did not reach Syrian targets and fell by accident in Iran. Moscow denied this.
Photo: A refugee camp in Latakia, the heartland of Bashar al-Assad's Alawite minority, offers the Russian military a safe environment.
Russia’s increased involvement also raises the risk of getting bogged down in a protracted conflict. Mr Assad’s ground troops may not be able to seize on the opportunities provided by Russia’s air strikes to reclaim cities like Palmyra or Aleppo, or could fail to hold them.
Without a clear victory for Mr Assad, whom the Kremlin has supported with money and weapons since the start of the Syrian conflict, Mr Putin may be forced to expand Russia’s presence, thus raising the likelihood that something will go wrong.
Russia’s bombing sorties already have hit hundreds of targets, according to the Defence Ministry.
The Syrian American Medical Society, which operates hospitals in opposition controlled parts of Syria, said on Friday that Russian air strikes had struck nine hospitals in Syria this month, leaving thousands of people without access to medical care.
The organisation did not provide a specific death toll, or say how it knew the air strikes had been carried out by Russian planes.
The Defence Ministry declined to comment. A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman has dismissed previous claims that Russian jet sorties have targeted or hit hospitals.
The Defence Ministry publicly denies any Russian deaths have occurred as a result of its operations. But the ministry official who confirmed the special forces also said that one Russian soldier has died in Syria due to careless handling of weaponry.
A Kremlin-friendly pollster said on Thursday that the Syrian operation had pushed Mr Putin’s approval ratings to a historic high of 89.9 per cent.
But memories of the Soviet Union’s 1979-89 war in Afghanistan, in which the Defence Ministry routinely deceived its own troops and the public about losses suffered, are still fresh, said Sergei Krivenko, a member of the presidential council on human rights.
“The propaganda is already in place so that the public will tolerate limited losses,” Mr Krivenko said. “But if a ground operation begins, then who knows.”
While the billions of dollars Russia has poured into its military has boosted the fighting capabilities of the more elite units, it has yet to trickle down, analysts say. And while Russia is making progress on creating an army of contract soldiers, it is still largely made up of draftees.
“Russia doesn’t have the manpower to carry out a long-term conflict on the ground in Syria,” defence analyst Alexander Golts said.
Furthermore, signals of disquiet have appeared in the ranks over the methods the Defence Ministry has used to deploy troops to Syria. Last month, several career soldiers called a military prosecutor complaining that they were being sent to Syria without written orders, meaning they could be denied extra pay for the deployment.
When they raised questions they were sent back to their base in the Ural region, said Ivan Pavlov, one of the lawyers working on their case. “The military doesn’t treat soldiers like human beings and acts like it needs no explanation for its actions,“ he said. “But you can’t create an army out of slaves.”
Meanwhile commanders of Syrian rebel groups report that they have been able to hold back government advances despite the presence of Russian aircraft and artillery for almost a month.
The failure to break the resistance of rebel forces suggests that the Russian intervention has served to re-establish a stalemate on the battlefield — perhaps improving the prospects for diplomacy.
Syrian rebels say that the key to their success since the start of the Russian offensive has been the covert CIA-backed program to supply BGM-71 TOW antitank weapons to more than 40 moderate Free Syrian Army groups.
Commanders and TOW operators said that the missiles had broken Syrian government advances, destroying 25 tanks and armoured vehicles in Hama province on the first day of the offensive alone. The government offensive has secured several villages in northern Hama and a few miles of territory south of Aleppo but made no strategic gains.
“Despite everything, the Russian raids haven’t had that huge an effect on our movement and fighting ability,” Hussam Salameh, a commander with Ahrar al-Sham in Idlib province, said.
AFP reported that Syria’s Western-backed opposition on Saturday rejected a Russian offer to assist them against the Islamic State jihadist group and dismissed Moscow’s call for new elections.
“Russia is bombing the Free Syrian Army and now it wants to cooperate with us, while it remains committed to Assad? We don’t understand Russia at all!” said Lieutenant Colonel Ahmad Saoud, a spokesman for the Division 13 rebel group.
Samir Nashar, a member of the Syrian National Coalition, the opposition’s main political body, was equally dismissive of an alliance between moderate rebels and Russia.
“Instead of talking about their willingness to support the Free Syrian Army, they should stop bombing it,” he told AFP.
The comments came after Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Saturday that Moscow was ready to support Syria’s “patriotic opposition, including the so-called Free Syrian Army, from the air”.
“The main thing for us is to approach the people fully in charge of representing these or those armed groups fighting terrorism among other things,” he told Rossiya 1 television station.
Mr Lavrov also told the station that he hoped to see political progress in Syria and a move toward new elections.
with Philip Shishkin of the Journal in Washington and Times Middle East Correspondent Tom Coghlan
The Wall Street Journal, The Times
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