What Is Russia Up To, and Is It Time to Draw the Line?

[Boats]

What Is Russia Up To, and Is It Time to Draw the Line?
By David E. Sanger
RE: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/30/wo...liar.html?_r=0

President Obama and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia failed to resolve their differences, including Syria, after 90 minutes together at a meeting in Hangzhou, China, on Sept. 5. Credit Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik, via Reuters

WASHINGTON — Escalating airstrikes in Syria. Sophisticated cyberattacks, apparently intended to influence the American election. New evidence of complicity in shooting down a civilian airliner.

The behavior of Russia in the last few weeks has echoes of some of the uglier moments of the Cold War, an era of proxy battles that ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. President Obama, fresh from a meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin this month, wondered aloud whether the Russian leader was content living with a “constant, low-grade conflict.” His reference was to Ukraine, but he could have been addressing any of the arenas where Mr. Putin has reveled in his new role as the great disrupter of American plans around the globe.

“It seems to me we have Mr. Putin’s answer,” said Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of a coming book, “A World in Disarray.” “He’s answered in the affirmative. Low-grade conflict is his thing. And the question is how directly or indirectly we introduce costs.”

None of these conflicts have, in fact, cost Mr. Putin very much. Cyberpower in particular is tailor-made for a country in Russia’s circumstances — a declining economy with the gross domestic product of Italy. It is dirt cheap, hard to trace to a specific aggressor and perfect for sowing confusion, which may be the limits of Mr. Putin’s goals.

Continue reading the main story
RELATED COVERAGE


‘Gaps of Trust’ With Russia Bar a Syrian Truce, Obama Says SEPT. 5, 2016

Military Success in Syria Gives Putin Upper Hand in U.S. Proxy War AUG. 6, 2016

Obama Calls on Putin to Help Reduce Violence in Syria After Peace Talks Stall APRIL 18, 2016

Opinion Thomas L. Friedman
Syria, Obama and Putin SEPT. 30, 2015
RECENT COMMENTS

BR September 30, 2016
Love the bourgeoisie terms and phrases the times uses. Tickles me pink. "Echoes" of the cold war eh? He he.
Jill September 30, 2016
Yes, Russia has the cybertools to create havoc on the U.S. Thank you, Edward Snowden. Or does anyone still think he is their freeloading...
S Nillissen September 30, 2016
Mr Sanger, Have you bought into the intelligence comments that offer such a poor understanding of Mr Putin. It is utter nonsense to...
SEE ALL COMMENTS
ADVERTISEMENT

Continue reading the main story

The bigger question confronting American intelligence officials, though, is whether the Russian president has a grander scheme at work. So far, their conclusion is probably not. Mr. Putin’s moves, they argue in background conversations, are largely tactical, intended to bolster his international image at a moment he has plenty of troubles back home.

For a year now, the White House has argued that these escalating clashes, while worrisome, do not constitute a new Cold War. There is no great ideological struggle underway. No one is brandishing nuclear weapons, though after two decades of reducing their forces, each is now racing to modernize them. Syria is a humanitarian disaster of barely imaginable scope, but it is not a fundamental strategic threat to American interests.

Yet the few veterans of that era still in senior posts see similarities. “It shouldn’t come as a big shock to people,” James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, said about the “information warfare” that has been put to sophisticated use from Kiev, Ukraine, to Washington. “I think it’s more dramatic maybe because now they have the cybertools.”

Mr. Clapper’s colleagues go a step further in less public conversations. They argue that Mr. Putin has played his hand skillfully, stringing along Secretary of State John Kerry in a yearlong negotiation over cease-fires and political transitions in Syria, all the while bolstering their proxy, President Bashar al-Assad. Mr. Kerry’s efforts in Syria all but collapsed this week in waves of Russian and Syrian government airstrikes.

The deal in Ukraine is hanging on, but just barely: Russia conveniently ignores many of the commitments it signed and has denied involvement in the downing two years ago of a Malaysia Airlines jet flying over Ukraine that killed 298 people.

The theft of voter rolls in Arizona and Illinois — and “poking around” in the networks of other states, as James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, described it to Congress this week without naming the Russians as perpetrators — may be intended to rattle the United States, rather than change votes.

“It’s probably not real, real clear whether there’s influence in terms of an outcome,” Mr. Clapper said. “What I worry about more — frankly — is just sowing the seeds of doubt, where doubt is cast on the whole process.”

So far, the American response has been decidedly mixed. The West’s sanctions against Russia for the annexation of Crimea have clearly stung; Russian officials make no effort to hide their desire to get them lifted. But the White House has not publicly blamed Russia for the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, the theft of the Arizona and Illinois voter registration rolls, or breaking into the cellphones of Democratic operatives.

Mr. Obama pulled Mr. Putin aside in China for a conversation that officials decline to recount, and Mr. Kerry has done the same with his counterpart during the long effort to find common ground in bringing peace to Syria.

The president’s reluctance to publicly blame the Russians — born of concern that taking on Mr. Putin head-on would only invite him to escalate — has led to something of an uprising in parts of the White House and the State Department. A range of cyberstrategists and younger diplomats have complained over the past nine months that the failure to draw lines has encouraged Mr. Putin to see what else he can accomplish, especially at a time of political transition in the United States.

Few in the American intelligence community predicted much of this. Intelligence assets have been so focused for the past 15 years on counterterrorism that traditional targets have taken something of a back seat — they have not been ignored, one senior intelligence official said recently, but only lately have they begun to receive new resources.

Perhaps that contributed to some misjudgments. It was more than a year ago that Mr. Obama said Russia would find itself in a “quagmire” in Syria; it may yet, but so far Mr. Putin’s air war has propped up Mr. Assad, though at such a horrific human cost in the city of Aleppo that the United Nations’ humanitarian chief, Stephen O’Brien, told the Security Council on Thursday that it had become a “merciless abyss of humanitarian catastrophe.”

Mr. Kerry threatened earlier this week to cut off all negotiations with the Russians. The Russian Foreign Ministry responded that the United States was in an “emotional breakdown” and rejected the effort to restore a seven-day pause in hostilities, the first step in an agreement Mr. Kerry reached with his counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, on Sept. 9.

That was mild compared with what the spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Defense, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, said. He called the opposition leaders the United States has been not-so-covertly arming in Syria “a U.S.-controlled terrorist international,” using a phrase that was a throwback to Soviet times.

And he warned that “should any attempt be made to carry out any threats against Russia or Russian servicemen in Syria, it is far from guaranteed” that the American-backed militias would have enough body bags.

So far, though, Mr. Putin has shown some caution. While he has tried to intimidate NATO nations with overflights of bombers, nuclear submarine runs along coasts and military exercises near the borders of Estonia and Latvia, he has been careful to stay on his side of the boundaries.

“These are all occurring in gray-zone locations with gray-zone tactics,” said Robert Kagan, a historian at the Brookings Institution who has written on the return of geopolitical conflict. The question the United States will have to face, he added, is “Are we willing to operate in the gray area, too?”

[Boats]

Military Success in Syria Gives Putin Upper Hand in U.S. Proxy War
By MARK MAZZETTI, ANNE BARNARD and ERIC SCHMITT
RE: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/wo...roxy-war.html?

Military Success in Syria Gives Putin Upper Hand in U.S. Proxy War

WASHINGTON — The Syrian military was foundering last year, with thousands of rebel fighters pushing into areas of the country long considered to be government strongholds. The rebel offensive was aided by powerful tank-destroying missiles supplied by the Central Intelligence Agency and Saudi Arabia.

Intelligence assessments circulated in Washington that the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, was losing his grip on power.

But then the Russians arrived, bludgeoning C.I.A.-backed rebel forces with an air campaign that has sent them into retreat. And now rebel commanders, clinging to besieged neighborhoods in the divided city of Aleppo, say their shipments of C.I.A.-provided antitank missiles are drying up.

For the first time since Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Russian military for the past year has been in direct combat with rebel forces trained and supplied by the C.I.A. The American-supplied Afghan fighters prevailed during that Cold War conflict. But this time the outcome — thus far — has been different.

“Russia has won the proxy war, at least for now,” said Michael Kofman, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

Russia’s battlefield successes in Syria have given Moscow, isolated by the West after its annexation of Crimea and other incursions into Ukraine, new leverage in decisions about the future of the Middle East.

The Obama administration is now talking with President Vladimir V. Putin’s government about a plan to share intelligence and coordinate airstrikes against the Islamic State and other militant groups in Syria, and Mr. Putin has thus far met his goals in Syria without becoming caught in a quagmire that some — including President Obama — had predicted he would.

But even Mr. Obama has expressed wariness about an enduring deal with Moscow. “I’m not confident that we can trust the Russians or Vladimir Putin,” Mr. Obama said at a news conference on Thursday. “Whenever you are trying to broker any kind of deal with an individual like that or a country like that, you have got to go in there with some skepticism.”

At the same time, some military experts point out that Mr. Putin has saddled Russia with the burden of propping up a Syrian military that has had difficulty vanquishing the rebels on its own.

The Russian campaign began in September, after a monthslong offensive by C.I.A.-backed rebel groups won new territory in Idlib, Hama and Latakia Provinces in northern Syria. One problem for Washington: Those groups sometimes fought alongside soldiers of the Nusra Front, which until recently was officially affiliated with Al Qaeda.

The offensive took Syrian troops by surprise, prompting concerns in Moscow and Damascus that Mr. Assad’s government, long supported by the Russians, might be in trouble.

Some of the rebel groups boasted at the time that powerful TOW antitank missiles provided by American and Saudi intelligence operatives were a key to their success. For several years, the C.I.A. has joined with the spy services of several Arab nations to arm and train the rebels at bases in Jordan and Qatar, with the Saudis bankrolling much of the operation.

A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment about any American assistance to Syrian rebels.

But Lt. Col. Fares al-Bayyoush, a former aviation engineer who heads the rebel group Fursan al-Haq, said during an interview in May 2015 that his group would receive new shipments of the antitank weapons as soon as the missiles were used.

“We ask for ammunition and missiles, and we get more than we ask for,” he said.

Yet the advance also created problems for the fractious assortment of rebel groups, as it allowed the Nusra Front to gain control over more areas of northern Syria. The Obama administration has officially forbidden any Nusra fighters to receive weapons or training. But the group has at times shown greater prowess against the Syrian government forces than the C.I.A.’s proxies.

Moreover, they have shown that they can and will destroy or sideline C.I.A.-backed rebels who do not agree to battlefield alliances. Moscow cited the battlefield successes of the Nusra Front to justify its military incursion into Syria as a campaign to fight terrorism — even if its primary goal was to shore up Mr. Assad’s military against all insurgent groups, including the C.I.A.-backed rebels.

The Russians began a rapid military buildup in September, and launched an air campaign that targeted the Syrian rebel groups that posed the most direct threat to Mr. Assad’s government, including some of the C.I.A.-trained groups. By mid-October, Russia had escalated its airstrikes to nearly 90 on some days.

About 600 Russian marines landed in Syria with the mission of protecting the main air base in Latakia; that ground force has grown to about 4,000 throughout Syria, including several hundred special forces members.

It took some time for the Russian intervention to have a significant impact on the Syrian battlefield, prompting Mr. Obama to predict that Moscow might become bogged down in its own Middle East conflict.

“An attempt by Russia and Iran to prop up Assad and try to pacify the population is just going to get them stuck in a quagmire, and it won’t work,” Mr. Obama said at a news conference in October. “And they will be there for a while if they don’t take a different course.”

The C.I.A. moved to counter the Russian intervention, funneling several hundred additional TOW missiles to its proxies. One rebel commander, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of threats from more radical groups within the rebel coalition, said in October that his group could at that time get as many missiles as it wanted.

“It’s like a carte blanche,” he said. “Just fill in the numbers.”

But Russian firepower eventually overwhelmed the rebel groups in the north. By early this year, attacks by Russian long-range bombers, fighter jets, attack helicopters and cruise missiles allowed the Syrian Army to reverse many of the rebel gains — and seize areas near the Turkish border that many thought the government could never reclaim.

The flow of C.I.A. arms continued, but the weapons proved too little in the face of the Russian offensive.

Jeffrey White, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer who now studies Syria at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the Russians had built a capable intelligence network in Syria, giving them a better understanding of the terrain and location of rebel forces. That has allowed Russian troops to call in precision airstrikes, making them more effective against the rebels.

The mismatch has been most acute in the last several months, with Syrian government forces, with Russian help, laying siege to the rebel-held parts of Aleppo. Losing their foothold in Aleppo, once Syria’s largest city, would be a big blow to the rebels.

Syrian and Russian jets have carried out an indiscriminate pounding of Aleppo, including attacks on six hospitals in and around the city over the past week, according to a statement by Physicians for Human Rights.

“Since June, we’ve seen increasing reports of attacks on civilians in Aleppo and strikes on the region’s remaining medical infrastructure,” said Widney Brown, the group’s director of programs. “Each of these assaults constitutes a war crime.”

Rebel groups in recent days have made surprising gains in a new offensive to try to break through Syrian military lines encircling Aleppo, but if it fails, rebels inside the city will face a choice between enduring the siege or surrendering.

In recent interviews, rebel commanders said the flow of foreign weapons needed to break the siege had slowed.

“We are using most of our weapons in the battle for Aleppo,” said Mustafa al-Hussein, a member of Suqour al-Jabal, one of the C.I.A.-backed groups. He said the flow of weapons to the group had diminished in the past three to four months.

“Now we fire them only when it is necessary and urgent,” he said.

Another commander, Maj. Mousa al-Khalad of Division 13, a C.I.A.-backed rebel group operating in Idlib and Aleppo, said his group had received no missiles for two weeks.

“We filed a request to get TOW missiles for the Aleppo front,” he said, but the reply was that there were none in the warehouses.

Rebel leaders and military experts say that perhaps the most pressing danger is that supply routes from Turkey, which are essential to the C.I.A.-backed rebels, could be severed.

“The U.S. is doing just enough to placate its allies and partners and says it is doing something, but does not seek to do what it takes to change conditions on the battlefield,” said Emile Hokayem, a Middle East analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and an Assad critic.

Mr. Putin has achieved many of his larger goals — to prop up Mr. Assad’s government, retain access to the longtime Russian naval base on the Mediterranean Sea and use Syria as a proving ground for the most advanced Russian military technology.

Some military experts remain surprised that Mr. Putin took the risky step of fighting American-trained and equipped forces head on, but they also assess that his Syria gamble appears to be paying off.

It is the type of Cold War-era battle that Mr. Obama, in October, insisted he did not want to enter.

“We’re not going to make Syria into a proxy war between the United States and Russia,” he said. “This is not some superpower chessboard contest.”

Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon. Karam Shoumali contributed reporting from Istanbul, Maher Samaan from Beirut, and Steven Lee Myers from Washington.

[Boats]

Syria Outlines Plans for Conquest of Aleppo, Backed by Russian Power
By BEN HUBBARD and ANNE BARNARD
RE: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/29/wo...pgtype=article

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Syrian government and its powerful Russian allies laid out a road map on Thursday for subduing the rebel-held districts of the city of Aleppo by opening corridors for civilians to flee and offering amnesty to insurgents who lay down their arms.

But residents and rebel fighters remained deeply skeptical of those offers, while aid groups warned of a tightening siege that could increase the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people.

Control of Aleppo, Syria’s most populous city before the civil war began five years ago, has been a main objective of the conflict’s combatants. The city has been divided since 2012, with government forces controlling the western half and rebels holding districts in the east.

But Russia’s military intervention has provided an edge to the forces of President Bashar al-Assad, allowing them to cut off access to the city’s rebel-held areas, while also making life inside them worse through shelling and airstrikes against markets, bakeries and medical facilities — leaving entire neighborhoods in ruins.

Four hospitals have been struck and scores of civilians killed in the last week, according to monitoring groups. Rebel forces also use these neighborhoods to stage attacks that have killed civilians in government-held territory.

The fall of eastern Aleppo to government forces would be a major turning point in the war and would solidify Russia’s place as the most prominent foreign power involved in the conflict, which years of international diplomacy have failed to end.

The new government plan was presented on Thursday in coordinated announcements from Moscow and Damascus, along with airdrops over Aleppo of small food packs and maps indicating the escape routes.

The Russian defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, said three routes out of eastern Aleppo would be opened for civilians, who would be given food and medical care. A fourth route would be opened for armed insurgents, Mr. Shoigu said.

Mr. Assad issued a three-month amnesty for insurgents who turn themselves in, lay down their arms and release any captives, according to the Syrian state news agency, SANA. The Syrian Army also sent text messages calling on rebels to surrender and expel foreign fighters from their midst.

But many Syrians, Western diplomats and international aid groups doubted the sincerity of what Russia termed a “large-scale humanitarian operation,” contending that Russia had previously shown little concern for the plight of civilians in rebel-held areas and that the Syrian government had frequently employed brutal siege tactics against its foes.

The United Nations, which has tried to broker talks between the warring sides and facilitate aid delivery, was not consulted about the plan and so was unsure whether it could be considered a “humanitarian” move, said Staffan de Mistura, the global body’s envoy for Syria. He said that Russian, and perhaps American, military officials were heading to Geneva to discuss the plan.

Few residents of eastern Aleppo said they expected good treatment if they accepted the government’s offer.

Farida, a doctor in an Aleppo hospital who gave only her first name for safety reasons, noted that all the passages would take civilians to government-controlled areas. She said she feared that surrendering to government forces could mean either death or imprisonment.

She acknowledged, however, that some civilians want to leave.

Aid groups have been warning of an impending siege, and with it a humanitarian crisis, after government forces cut the last road connecting Aleppo’s eastern districts to rebel-held areas to the north.

Zaher Azzaher, an activist in Aleppo, said that residents had begun to feel the pinch; one of his neighbors had acquired two barrels of fuel and scores of people had lined up to get a share, he said.

“People are fighting over two bags of eggplants,” he said. “I don’t know how these eggplants managed to find their way here.”

He added that some residents hesitated to eat the food packs dropped from the air, out of fear that they might be poisoned.

The announcement of the exit corridors left other residents debating whether to leave.

“We have this discussion here every single minute: to leave or not to leave,” said Luay Barakat, a photographer in eastern Aleppo. He was trying to convince others to stay, he said, so that the government could not argue that all the civilians had fled and only rebels remained.

“If you leave, the regime will have the excuse to bomb us more,” he said he told other residents.

It remained unclear how the United States and other international powers would respond to the Syrian-Russian plan. The American government has called on Mr. Assad to step down and has provided limited military aid to some rebel groups. Its priority, however, is to weaken the jihadists of the Islamic State, who have no notable presence in Aleppo but control territory farther east.

Amnesty International criticized the plan, saying that allowing civilians to leave Aleppo was not enough, that pro-government forces also needed to let aid in.

“Providing safe routes for those civilians who wish to flee Aleppo city will not avert a humanitarian catastrophe,” the group said in a statement. “It is not a substitute for allowing impartial humanitarian relief for civilians who remain in opposition-held areas of the city or other besieged areas, many of whom will be skeptical about government promises.”

The impending siege of Aleppo recalled the Syrian government’s seizure of rebel-held neighborhoods in the city of Homs in 2014, when its forces surrounded the area and bombarded it while calling on civilians to leave.

It took more than two years to fully subjugate the city’s rebels, leaving entire districts in ruins. The rebel-held area in Aleppo is much larger, with many more fighters and civilians, so the siege there could take longer and exact a greater human toll.

Also on Thursday, the leader of the Nusra Front, the Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda, said the group was reforming itself under a new name and would have “no relationship with any outside party.”

In a video message online, the leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, said the move sought to keep Russia and the United States from bombing Syria’s rebels by removing what he called the “excuse” that they were linked to Al Qaeda. He renamed the group the Levant Conquest Front, but announced no changes in its ideology.

James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, dismissed the name change as a “P.R. move.’’ Mr. Clapper, speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, said the group was trying to attract more moderate rebel elements and avoid airstrikes.

Noah Bonsey, a Syria analyst with the International Crisis Group, said the name change would fail to convince Russia as well as the United States that the group had changed.

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Maher Samaan from Paris, Nick Cumming-Bruce from Geneva, Eric Schmitt from Aspen, Co., and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.