Putin and Biden learnt lessons from Syria’s gassing of civilians

By the end, there was little left. The old city of Homs and its surrounding neighbourhoods pummelled to concrete shells, a grey and dusty landscape in which Syria’s rebel fighters scavenged and survived the best they could.

The word ceasefire sometimes conjures up an idea of equality, of two combatants at an even standstill. That was not the case in Homs. In April 2014 the crescendo of regime-imposed ceasefires, humanitarian corridors and ultimatums was intended to demonstrate the upper hand President Assad had gained through the overwhelming force of his jets and artillery against lightly armed defenders.

In the first week of May, convoys of buses arrived to take the remaining rebels to other parts of Syria and Homs was back under the control of the regime.

That the scenes now playing out in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol seem familiar should not surprise us.

The Russians did not formally join the war in Syria until September 2015, but too much emphasis has been put on that date. The Syrian army was trained by the Soviets and had worked closely with Russia for decades, including during the earlier stages of the civil war.

The Syrians learnt from the battle for Grozny in Chechnya; in turn, in the present war, Russian generals have no doubt learnt from the brutal subjugation of Homs, followed by Aleppo in 2016 and the suburbs of Damascus in 2018.

There are differences. Russia has not yet been able to achieve the full control of the skies in Ukraine that it had in Syria. There are also similarities, most obviously the refusal of western powers however sympathetic to those fighting the Russians and their allies, to intervene militarily, for example by imposing a no-fly zone.

President Assad could never be sure of that in Syria, but in Ukraine President Putin was helpfully told well in advance. He may have failed to seize Kyiv quickly, but he can now wear down Ukrainian towns and cities slowly by bombing out their civilian populations, as happened in Syria, with impunity from Nato.

That leaves one major question. If all of Ukraine’s cities defend as resolutely as Mariupol has done, will Putin resort to chemical weapons as Assad did?

How often Assad deployed sarin, chlorine and other chemicals on his own people is a hotly disputed topic. The United Nations’ Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has investigated scores of allegations but its terms of operation were repeatedly changed, disallowing direct attribution in many cases, including the most serious, the killing of hundreds, perhaps more than 1,000 people with sarin in eastern Ghouta in August 2013.

Its reports make clear that no one else could have been responsible, however. The most comprehensive study by the Global Public Policy Institute, in Berlin, recorded 336 “credibly substantiated” uses of chemical weapons, 98 per cent by the regime, with the rest by Islamic State.

President Biden warned on Monday that Putin might resort to the same tactics. He said Putin and his army “had their backs against the wall”. “They are also suggesting that Ukraine has biological and chemical weapons,” Biden added. “That’s a clear sign he’s considering using both of those.”

The extent to which Russia can be held responsible for Assad’s use of sarin and chlorine is debatable. There has never been any suggestion that Russia’s own jets deployed them, and it was Russian diplomats who negotiated the deal under which most of Syria’s stockpile was handed over to the OPCW after the Ghouta attack.

However, Putin never disavowed or punished Assad for their use, or complained that Syria had never admitted to having chemical weapons. It would have been hard for him to do so. After all, it was Russian experts who trained Syrian scientists and the military in their manufacture and use, and kept silent about it for decades.

Perhaps more important than training Syrians was the part Russia played in the aftermath. From the morning of the Ghouta attack, Russian media and politicians, including Sergey Lavrov, the foreign minister, attempted to deflect blame on to the rebels.

They never quite got their message straight: through the next five years, they could never decide whether the rebels had faked the whole thing, or had in fact used chemical weapons against their own wives and children. But the effect of a mass outpouring of disinformation on state English-language media channels such as RT and on social media, backed up by academics and writers from both right-wing and left-wing circles in the West, confused huge numbers of people as to the true nature of the Assad regime — and of Russia itself.

This may be why Biden and other western partners are warning so repeatedly against Russian use of chemicals, for which they provide little evidence. In fact, Russia since the 1920s has largely avoided deploying them on the battlefield, though of course it is happy to use them as tools of assassination.

The war over Ukraine is partly one of political discourse. Biden, as vice-president, saw not only how President Obama broke his own red line when he said he would only intervene in Syria if Assad used chemical weapons and then failed to do so, but how he lost control of the whole political message of the war, abandoning it to cranks, the far right and Donald Trump.

By getting his accusations in first, Biden is showing he will not allow the same to happen again.