In the past 3 years, 2 countries demonstrated their reckless ability to drag the world into an all-out global war over Syria: NATO member Turkey in 2015 and US ally Israel this week. Both are responsible for shooting down a Russian military airplane legally operating in Syria:
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Turkey—directly, and Israel—through a callous F-16 maneuver involving Syrian air defense (according to the official narrative). What were the medium-term consequences for the first incident?
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Thanks to diplomacy and Russia/Syria/Iran victories, Turkey has been brought into the Astana peace process. Russia-Turkey relations are back on track (as on track as they could be): this is a limited tactical partnership in key areas in a relationship of mutual mistrust.
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Nonetheless, Russia deals with Turkey one-on-one bypassing NATO member U.S., which is significant. What about Israel? While demonstrating aviation skills that callously resulted in the deaths of 15 Russian servicemen, Israel shot itself in the foot.
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Russia has been cognizant of Israeli concerns in the region during the Syrian peace process, while Israel gave Russia less than a minute to remove its plane landing on its own airbase, as Israel conducted illegal strikes in Syria.
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Indeed the past year alone, Israel has carried out illegal strikes in Syria dozens of times under the pretext of self-defense against Iran. At this stage, it is difficult, if not impossible, to sympathize with this behavior.
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Also, a significant part of Israel’s population is expats from Russia, and at least some of them cannot be happy with Israel’s reckless behavior (much like a smaller Russian expat community was in Turkey). This creates unnecessary internal divisions.
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Where does this leave us? The Kremlin’s modus operandi has been restrained and focused on the long term. Those trigger-happy for a military retaliation will not get one. However, Israel seems to favor a divided Syria engulfed in chaos, whereas Russia and Iran seek the opposite.
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In this sense, it is surprising that there hadn’t been more military incidents of this kind between Russia and Israel. The latter will have to adapt its behavior by facing the realities on the ground—that Syria is largely liberated.
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And Russia has to face the limits of its multi-vector policy in the Middle East involving regional and global players with conflicting agendas.
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