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Five years of political capital, over a million tonnes of weapons, tens of billions of dollars, Russia’s role as both dominant regional presence and rising global force – these are all at stake if Vladimir Putin abandons Syria’s leader. This is the reckoning faced by the US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, as he travels to Moscow to try to prise the Russian president away from his support of Bashar al-Assad in the aftermath of last week’s nerve agent attack on Khan Sheikhun. [snip] There is little reason to think the Wednesday summit will lead to an escalation in tensions....

Could psycho elites start WWIII? What’s going on here, in Syria? It all seems to be maybe heavily screened and minimized by the Google Machine, but as far as I can see, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is “assisting” the President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, as he battles “rebels” who are trying to take him down and out and probably kill him.

Air strikes in northern Syria have hit at least 12 hospitals in recent weeks, killing at least 35 patients and medical staff in a new escalation of fighting, international medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres said on Thursday. The violence has also caused the displacement of thousands of civilians since the end of September, MSF said, reporting a significant increase strikes on medical facilities.

How Putin is Winning and Losing Syria No one is in Syria because of ISIS. October 8, 2015 Daniel Greenfield    Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. The Russian line is that they’re in Syria to fight ISIS. But the Russians, like the Turks, Iranians and Europeans, don’t care about ISIS. By declaring itself a Caliphate, ISIS made itself non-aligned. The fighting in Syria isn’t about ISIS. It predated the rise of ISIS as a major player. It’s about Syria. ISIS has become a convenient excuse for...

After over two years of isolation and vilification as the last significant friend of Bashar al-Assad, Russian President Vladimir Putin appears for now to have played a trump card in the Syrian crisis with a plan for the regime to hand over chemical weapons. If it works, the plan could offer the West a way out of threatened military strikes as retribution for a chemical attack blamed on the regime and restore Russia's image and regional influence which have been battered throughout the Arab Spring. Yet Putin will be acutely aware of the risks of the plan backfiring, in particular...

MOSCOW (AP) — In a surprise move, Russia promised Monday to push its ally Syria to place its chemical weapons under international control and then dismantle them quickly to avert U.S. strikes. The announcement by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov came a few hours after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that Syrian President Bashar Assad could resolve the crisis surrounding the alleged use of chemical weapons by his forces by surrendering control of "every single bit" of his arsenal to the international community by the end of the week.

Headline only. Syria welcomes Russia's proposal for Damascus to put its chemical weapons under international control: Foreign Minister Walid Al-Moualem by Margarita Noriega (Reuters) 10:41 AM

In what looks like an off-the-cuff blunder, Secretary of State John Kerry might have accidentally given Russian President Vladmir Putin the opportunity to muddy the international diplomatic waters and buy his friends in Syria some time. During a press briefing on Monday, Kerry said that Assad could avoid American air strikes by giving up all his chemical weapons within a week. Within hours, the State Department was forced to walk Kerry's new red line back with the claim that he was making a "rhetorical argument about the impossibility and unlikelihood of Assad turning over chemical weapons he has denied he...

Russia says a deadly March sarin attack in an Aleppo suburb was carried out by Syrian rebels, not forces loyal to President Bashar Assad, and it has delivered a 100-page report laying out its evidence to the United Nations. A statement posted on the Russian Foreign Ministry website late Wednesday said the report included detailed scientific analysis of samples that Russian technicians collected at the site of the alleged attack, Khan al Asal in northern Syria. The attack killed 26 people. A U.N. spokesman, Farhan Haq, confirmed that Russia delivered the report in July.

President Obama arrived in Russia today to find the already failing relations with his host in even worse condition. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threat to provide his Syrian allies with a missile shield in the event of U.S. airstrikes further complicates Obama’s flagging effort to win international support for an attack on Damascus. As the Guardian reports, Putin’s warning that an attack without UN backing would provoke military aid from Russia may drive away the handful of international partners for Obama’s proposed attack.

President Vladimir Putin offered a glimpse of international compromise over Syria on Wednesday, declining to entirely rule out Russian backing for military action as he prepared to host a summit of world leaders. As the United States and allies prepare to bypass any Russian U.N. veto and attack Damascus, there is little chance of Putin's support. But his words may herald new efforts to overcome great power rivalries that have let Syria descend into bloody chaos. At the same time, Moscow said it had sent a warship it calls a "carrier killer" to the eastern Mediterranean, where a U.S. fleet...

As the leaders of western nations remain mired in a toxic tank of groupthink that says Syria’s Bashar al-Assad must go and that if you disagree, you’re a heartless and ridiculous twit who doesn’t know anything, Russian President Vladimir Putin explained that it’s the rebels who are making Assad’s supporters heartless – by eating them in front of video cameras. What do these geniuses of elitist western thought come back with? Well, nothing, really. The seven words underlined below represent a “Bingo” moment for Putin. (...)