Syria And The End Of The Putin Regime

And that last bit is sure as hell coming, whether Putin retires voluntarily or not... Brazil is nice, this time of year. Ipanema Beach would be a lot more pleasant than Moscow, or Polar Star...

Recent reports from Rybar on Telegram:
”We have some disturbing news coming out of Syria being reported on Western Twitter and on Russian Telegram. A big channel that works with the Kremlin, but sometimes allows itself to criticize the MoD (Rybar), has confirmed that there are marooned Russian troops in Syria. Here:

🇷🇺🇸🇾 Unfortunately, as of 7 PM, we can make some disheartening conclusions: Russia's military presence in the Middle East region is hanging by a thread.

▪️Seeing the lack of activity by the Russian grouping of forces in Syria, Kurdish formations have begun blocking certain Russian military facilities in Deir ez-Zor.

▪️Jebla is under the control of armed formations. The Hmeimim base is cut off.

▪️Russian warships have been withdrawn from the port of Tartus to the roadstead to reduce the threat from rogue bandit formations that have decided to shell them.

▪️Positions at the oil refinery in the Homs desert are also blocked.

📍We have no right to speak about the plans of the Russian military leadership: what was decided in the high offices is absolutely irrelevant on the ground.

Simply because on the ground, there was no initiative. The expectation of instructions from Moscow on Sunday, the lack of understanding that it was necessary to act outside the system, to make an attempt for another dash to Pristina or to rush to defend South Ossetia did not materialize.

In their time, these were the very events that went down in history and glorified Russia precisely because the people on the ground acted on their own initiative, taking on much more than the instructions or orders that no one gave.

This time, everything was done correctly in a systemic way. Inertly and indifferently, in other words.” https://t.me/rybar_in_english/20032, cited in

Has Putin Abandoned the Russian Troops in Syria?

And from the same general source:

Comparisons to Afghanistan being made as well. Here:

Do you remember how the propagandists laughed at the Americans fleeing Afghanistan? It seems that the predictions (https://t.me/KvachkovV/2680) that friend Erdogan would let friend Vladimir save face and calmly withdraw equipment and our soldiers who were surrounded turned out to be wrong. The worst thing that the professionals warned about may happen in the very near future or is already happening right now...

The bases are already surrounded. Here:

❗One of the units of the Russian Armed Forces is completely surrounded in Syria and has no way to break through to the main forces in Latakia, reports (https://t.me/razvedosaa/11878) military blogger Alexander Arutyunov.

“We have taken up a circular defense. We are waiting. They are shooting all around, but it is not clear where. It seems that they are just happy ...”, he quotes the words of the surrounded soldiers.

According to him, “there is no military solution to this problem, but there is still a political one.” Ibid.

And: “Following negotiations between Mr. Assad and several participants in the armed conflict on the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic, he made the decision to step down as president and leave the country, issuing instructions to ensure a peaceful transfer of power. Russia did not participate in these negotiations,” Russian diplomats stated.

Moscow issued “a strong appeal to all involved parties” to refrain from violence and resolve all issues through political means. The ministry’s statement emphasizes that Russia “is in contact with all Syrian opposition groups.”

Moscow also reported that it’s taking “all necessary measures” to ensure the safety of Russian citizens in Syria.

“Russian military bases in Syria are on high alert. There is no serious threat to their security at the moment,” the Foreign Ministry added.” https://meduza.io/en/news/2024/12/08/moscow-confirms-that-assad-has-stepped-down-as-syria-s-president-and-fled-the-country

My take on this - the Russian Foreign Ministry is either lying through its teeth - they got some valuable practice in this with the recent Tucker Carlson interview with Sergei Lavrov, in which they saw what ridiculous lies they could tell Tucker without challenge - or they’ve succumbed to a massive dose of copium. The truth of the matter is that Russia has lost one of its most important naval bases - effectively its only foreign base - at Tartus in Syria, which they’ve had since 1953. That means that Russian naval vessels have no place to go in the Mediterranean - and they can’t go through the Dardanelles, because Turkey is enforcing the Montreux Convention and not allowing Russian naval vessels through. So now they effectively have the bases at Murmansk, Vladivostok, (and St Petersburg and Kaliningrad - h/t Francis Turner), and Venezuela and Cuba are a long, long way away. The air base in Syria, which they also lost, is vital to the logistics of their forces in Africa, and I’m pretty sure they don’t have any port facilities in Africa, so the Russian troops there are effectively stranded.

There are people in Russia who do have some amount of power, maybe a lot more than is thought, and now they have a few things to think about:

1. Russia can’t project force using boots on the ground beyond its national borders. They’re in a three-year-long stalemate in Ukraine, in which their largest advance has been 25 miles past the 2022 borders - and they still don’t control all of the oblasts they’ve claimed as Russian. They don’t control the airspace over Crimea, and they don’t control the Black Sea airspace or open water, effectively their Black Sea Fleet is bottled up in Novorossisk. Novorossiya may well revert back to Ukraine, and sooner rather than later.

2. Russia just lost its major sea and air base in Syria, which means they can no longer project force in the Mediterranean, or in the Red Sea, or in the Arabian Sea, or in the Indian Ocean, or in Africa. It’s a long way from Murmansk or St Petersburg or Kaliningrad to those places, especially in winter. It’s an even longer way from Vladivostok. They need to move troops and logistics, and that’s going to be really hard and really expensive from here on out.

3. Unless Russia just didn’t have the troop strength and materiel to defend its ally in Syria - or at least its bases, sea and air - its failure to do so is inexplicable… so my conclusion is that they’ve significantly weakened their military forces and run through sufficient weapons, ammo, and materiel in their Ukranian misadventure so as to make it impossible to project sufficient force for an effective intervention to save those vital bases.

4. There are other parties who would probably take great interest in the fact of Putin’s failure to protect Russia’s vital national security interests in Syria - namely, the Chinese, who may have it on their mind to do a bit of intervention on their own, in Russia’s Far East and offshore islands, with all of those fossil fuel and mineral resources present. They tried it once in 1969, and got booted out by the Red Army. The Russian Army of today is a pale shadow of what the Red Army once was. My bet is that the Chinese will make a try pretty quick, before the Russian Army can recover - and the Russian government will be no longer able to do much of anything about it, especially if done quickly - perhaps by airborne invasion - and it becomes a fait accompli - and the Chinese already have 1.5 million of their nationals on the ground.

5. The ruble is going into the toilet - people aren’t keeping their money in rubles if they can avoid it, even interest rates of 21% aren’t enough to do it. Inflation is officially 9% per year, but it’s probably a lot more than that. Just like Biden, Putin is probably lying his head off about inflation - and as long as Russia continues to piss away money in Ukraine, with its incompetent and corrupt General Staff - although no one will ever beat Shoigu’s record heist of 11 trillion rubles - it’s just going to make things worse. In fact, hyperinflation could get good and kicked off, see https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/12/06/financial-analyst-alexander-kolyandr-explains-russian-policymakers-dwindling-options-amid-growing-monetary-grief

6. “Nothing prevents the Central Bank from intervening if they see it as a danger to the national banking system, but I don’t think they see it like that. And second, they don’t have much because of the sanctions. They have $30-32 billion remaining in their National Wellbeing Fund. That’s what they can use for buying rubles. They don’t have much to intervene. There were also verbal interventions, basically soothing the market and telling everyone that everything’s fine. And that’s about it.

   The only gun left in the holster is to ask Putin to make a phone call to exporters — namely, to oil companies — and kindly ask them to sell a bit of their dollars on the market. And that’s about it. While the Russian economy is running at full throttle and has no capacity to increase output, devaluation doesn’t lead to more domestic producers jumping in. If you don't have the capacity to produce more, you simply do not produce more, regardless of the exchange rate. That means the inflationary effect of devaluation is greater than before the war. So, yes, on the one hand, they need to keep inflation under control. On the other hand, they have very limited abilities to do that. So, I suppose they will do very little.” Ibid.

And this:

Moscow this time of year is a cold, cold place… It might be a good thing for Putin, his family, and close associates, to head to more temperate climes, like those in Brazil - they have an excellent beach in Rio de Janeiro, known as Ipanema:

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Here’s a bit of in-depth comment from Konstantin Samoilov:

Just for fun, here’s Varlamov’s take - subtitles in English via closed captioning:

When I see something from Mick Ryan, of Futura Doctrina and Commander Salamander, I’ll add it here…