Russian Parliament Grants Putin Permission To Use Military In Syria

The upper house of Russia’s parliament has unanimously voted to give President Vladimir Putin permission to use the country’s armed forces in Syria, Putin’s chief of staff said.

Sergei Ivanov told reporters after the vote Wednesday: “The Federation Council unanimously supported the president’s request — 162 votes in favor [of granting permission],” according to Russia’s TASS Agency. Russian law requires Putin seek authorization for military action from the parliament’s upper house, which is a rubber stamp pliant to his every will. The last time parliament granted such a permission was granted was last year, when Russian troops seized the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad requested Russia’s intervention, Ivanov added. He said that this demonstrated a “principal difference between the approaches of the Russian Federation and its Western partners: they don’t observe international law, and we do.” The move could pit Russia against both ISIS militants and the various Islamist rebels fighting Assad’s troops, which it says are also terrorist groups.

Speaking at the United Nations on Monday, Putin said it was an “enormous mistake to refuse to cooperate with the Syrian government and its armed forces, who are valiantly fighting terrorism face to face.” That stance has repeatedly seen him clash with U.S. President Barack Obama, who says Assad must leave office for the conflict to end. In recent weeks, however, Obama has softened his stance as Russia — Syria’s major international ally — has built up an air base with some 2,000 personnel near the coastal stronghold of Latakia.

Ivanov said that ground troops would not be deployed, and that only Russia’s air force would be used, echoing comments Putin made last week. “The military goal of the operation is exclusively air support of the Syrian government forces against ISIS,” he said. He declined to provide specifics of the operation, but said it would “not go on infinitely and has specific time constraints.”

Russian public opinion has backed Putin’s efforts to found an “anti-terrorist coalition”including Iran, Iraq, and Syria, but lacks the enthusiasm it had for direct military operations in Ukraine. Nearly 70 percent of Russians oppose Moscow providing direct military aid to Assad, according to a recent poll by the independent Levada Center. Several soldiers face treason charges after refusing deployment to Syria, according to the news site Gazeta.ru. On Wednesday, the newspaper Kommersantreported that several dozen irregular special forces veterans who fought on the side of rebels in Ukraine were preparing to deploy to Syria.

The Kremlin claims its actions are motivated in part by the threat posed to it from the more than 2,000 Russian-speaking radicals it says are fighting alongside ISIS. Putin’s speech on Monday, met with breathless hype in Russia’s state media, also made it clear that Russia’s Syrian gambit seeks to end its international isolation over the war in Ukraine and its support for Assad. Obama met with Putin on Monday after avoiding a summit for more than two years, then ordered the Pentagon to open a channel with Russia to “avoid conflict in the air” with the U.S. forces carrying out strikes against ISIS on Tuesday.

“I think the effectiveness of such an operation will be limited by definition. The planes that have been deployed there — Su-25, Su-24 — are old models, and even though they have been upgraded somewhat they are used to carry out strikes at high altitude,” said Ruslan Pukhov, an arms trade expert who advises Russia’s defense ministry.

Pukhov added that Russian pilots were far less experienced in carrying out the high-precision airstrikes required against ISIS and other radical groups in Syria than U.S. and European pilots with experience in Iraq, Libya, and Yugoslavia. “What our Western partners picked up over the course of 15 years, we have to learn on the run,” he said.