Putin Promises Only Indirect Support For Assad Atrocities

The Russian leader assured the international community that if such episodes occur, his soldiers would only stand on the sidelines and cheer.

Moscow, September 16 – Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to assuage international concern over his country’s growing military involvement in Syria, saying that his troops would try to provide only indirect support for the Assad regime’s war crimes.

As Russian engineers worked alongside their Syrian counterparts to lengthen the Latakia runway to accommodate even larger military cargo planes than have been ferrying troops, vehicles, and supplies for many months, Putin addressed accusations that his muscular foreign policy was propping up a brutal dictator, offering guarantees that if forces loyal to Assad committed any atrocities, Russian soldiers would only be peripherally or indirectly involved. Putin has insisted that strengthening Assad is the only way to defeat the Islamic State and restore stability to Syria, which has been embroiled in a four-year-old civil war that has claimed for than 200,000 lives and rendered millions refugees. Assad’s tactics have included chemical weapons, the execution of prisoners, and the use of barrel bombs, which wreak large-scale destruction and kill indiscriminately. The Russian leader assured the international community that if such episodes recur, his soldiers would only stand on the sidelines and cheer, or at most provide high-fives and logistical assistance to the Syrian units actually engaging in the war crimes.

“Having been victims of countless atrocities at the hands of Nazi Germany just a generation ago, we Russians know full well the horrors of war crimes,” Putin told reporters. “Basher el-Assad is not an ideal statesman, but he is an important ally in the fight against Islamic terrorism, and we must find a middle ground that, while it does not whitewash anyone’s misdeeds, neither does it allow an insistence on our allies’ absolute piety to paralyze us in that fight.” That middle ground, said Putin,has been found in an arrangement that explicitly bars Russian troops from direct participation in executions, chemical weapons deployment, or indiscriminate killings of noncombatants.

International observers remain skeptical of Putin’s claims, noting that none of the Russian commanders have sufficient experience in identifying a developing atrocity. “Thirty years ago, with Soviet troops in Afghanistan repressing violent opposition by any and all means, an entire generation of Russian soldiers got to know firsthand what an atrocity was, and how to tell one was in the offing,” said Col. Buddy Sunday (Ret.) of the British Royal Paratroopers. “But today’s Russian soldiers, even the senior officers, haven’t had time to be involved in that many war crimes. They’ve fought where – in Ukraine? Georgia? Chechnya? That’s not enough experience with atrocities.”

A Putin spokesman responded that such a problem would be remedied soon enough.