"... Russians to start withdrawing from Syria..." Reuters

"President Vladimir Putin said on Monday "the main part" of Russian armed forces in Syria would start to withdraw, and instructed his diplomats to step up the push for peace as U.N.-mediated talks resumed in Geneva on ending the five-year war.

Syria announced President Bashar al-Assad had agreed on the "reduction" of Russian forces in a telephone call with Putin. Western diplomats urged caution and the anti-Assad opposition expressed bafflement, with a spokesman saying "nobody knows what is in Putin's mind".

Russia's military intervention in Syria in September helped to turn the tide of war in Assad's favor after months of gains in western Syria by rebel fighters, who were aided by foreign military supplies including U.S.-made anti-tank missiles."  Reuters

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At first glance this seems like a valiant effort to "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory," but, maybe not.   Bibi's pal, Biden in his recent presser in Israel said something like "even Russia has heard the Lord about Syria."  That led Bibi to caution him on the spot to consider whether or not he wanted to use these words.  Biden may have been in Israel to shop for a retirement villa on the beach, but among his tasks may also have been the job of informing Natanyahu of a bargain with Russia over Syria and Ukraine.  IMO "bth" is probably right that we will soon see remarkable "progress" in a settlement of some kind over Ukraine and a reduction or removal of sanctions on Russia.  US "officials" have been quoted today as this having "dropped from the sky."  Well, pilgrims, "officials" often don't know what their betters are up to.

Syria?  Perhaps the judgment in Moscow is that the process of strengthening the R+6 local forces has progressed far enough that as someone wrote here "they can take off the training wheels."  Well, they are on the ground and not I, but I remain concerned about the relatively small forces at the disposal of the Syrian government.  Is partition in the future?  I suppose we will have to wait to know. 

None of this can be good news for Bibi.

I will welcome analytic posts on this development by member of the committee.  pl  

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-russia-pullout-idUSKCN0WG23C

Comments

[William R. Cumming]

Whatever the risk the next U.S. President will stop pouring blood and terasure into the sand!

[William R. Cumming]

Is Chechknya [sic] majority Muslim?

[LeaNder]

"I can see some other faction ..."

no doubt that is always a possibility considering the context. Meaning? The Gaza scenario or the brewing dissent in Gaza & "Judea and Samaria" may trigger events in Lebanon too?

in any case, to this acknowledge nitwit, it triggers this association. Concerning Israel/Palestine, I seem to need a mental distance.

[LeaNder]

SmoothieX12, dear, while I have no idea if you are real or if you invented yourself as concerned Russian living in the US. No clear picture yet.

"But fact is, Washington would rather have no Russians in the ME at all."

Who is Washington, and who is Putin?

[aleksandar]

I wouldn't use "like" about Putin thinking, I always wonder if this guy in not a new model of Super Cyborg.

Well, sorry for the joke, sir.

Economic sanctions are weapons for Putin against the oligarchs, most of them pro-west and waiting for the "ol' good Yeltine years".
The main effect of sanction is not about trade,and so on, and so on as the MSM repeat but about the fact that russian firms cannot finance theirs activities and projects with loans on the western bank market.
They have to find internal funding or ask China.
Both solutions will reduce financial ties between oligarchs and the West, push them to use roubles and yuans, and by the way, less US dollars.
That under the political and economic supervision of Putin administration.
Not so bad, isn't ?

Russian banking system is less than efficient.
To drain money russian Gvt has decided last month to create a Official Postal Bank all over Russian Federation using post offices network.
It's a long term project but the idea is clear, russian money funding russian economy.
The one who pay (or invest) can order.

Sanctions, so far, are viewed in Moscou as an opportunity of financial autonomy and a step toward banking, industrial and agricultural development.

ie : Agriculture Minister, Alexander Tkachyov stated on Tuesday that Russia will be less reliant on food imports in future, hoping to eliminate them from the market altogether by 2025.

The bear walk slowly, but walk.

[Babak Makkinejad]

I prefer my own formulation which is empirically based on the Diocletian Line and the notion of the Persistence of the Past.

"Seems the Diocletians are both black and white, good and evil."; how droll, Mani would have been amused by your statement.

The time for the creation of legitimate political authority by the Western Diocletians states outside of her original boundaries is past.

Accept that limitation and move on to avoid further grief, to yourselves and to others.

I do not understand your last sentence.

[Babak Makkinejad]

There is a saying in Persian:

"If you do not have a headache, you should not bandage your head."

So, my view is this: what does the United States gain by an endless confrontation with the Russian Federation? Or Iran? and I suppose, in the ripeness of time, with China?

[LeaNder]

Explain: "Putin Vse Slil"

the military in Russia knows what they are doing but analogous to Jelzin the Putin "Entourage" does not?

Anyway what does the above mean?

[SmoothieX12]

"Anyway what does the above mean?"

It means that there is a "school of thought" (or rather lack there of, I mean thought;-) in Russia, which since the very start of Maidan coup in Kiev thinks that Russia could have gone even further and not just returned Crimea but liberated the whole Novorossya. In general, these are people who are very much for military solution to everything. Their favorite slogan is "Putin Vse Slil" which means in English Putin Flushed Everything down the toilet. This phrase became a meme. The most popular representative of this school is so called Colonel Cassad (Boris Rozhin) who, since the inception, was in permanent panic mode predicting the collapse of everything and accusing Russia of:

1. Sabotaging Donbas, leaving it alone;
2. Of having omnipotent, God-like, Surkov making decisions on sabotaging Donbas over the head of poor, confused and impotent Putin;
3. Basing, initially, own "assessments" on the thoughts of infamous Igor Strelkov, all of which turned out to be utter BS.

Plus many other things of this nature. It was not until famous interview of REAL former officer and famous military journalist Vlad Shurygin with representatives of "Northern Wind" that Colonel Cassad, who is not a colonel, and his "equals" such as ever hysterical El Murid got shot down in terms of accusing Kremlin of "flushing everything down the toilet". The fact that people such as Cassad or Murid or famous BSer Putnik, whose audiences are mostly young and inexperienced people, while serving as combat news clearing houses, were absolutely not acquainted with the way decisions are made on the top military-political level was somehow lost on Putin Vse Slil crowd.

Needless to say, even today, these people still believe that Russia in 2014 could have gone in victorious march to Kiev, those people also will, and they do, think that Russia should have completely liberated Syria. Any appeals to think within larger geostrategic, resources, operational and political frameworks go unheeded by this crowd so short of utter destruction of evil, raising Russian flag over ruins of whatever--nothing will move those people to admit that Putin plays well and he has on several hundred orders of magnitude better knowledge of global arena than all those Putin Vse Slin "analysts" and bloggers combined.

In my post I underscored, that I am not a fanboy of Putin (and I still have a lot of questions to ask him) but it is impossible to ignore anymore a simple fact, that today he is the only global figure which can be compared to likes of Bismark and Peter The Great, or Stalin in the scale of his influence on the formation of the new geopolitical order. Losers and Vse Slil people simply do command such level of both hatred and admiration which Putin does today. Events in Syria proved it yet again. Another matter, that it should be clearly understood that Putin is not alone and he is, indeed, a "moderate" one.

[SmoothieX12]

Correction. In: "Losers and Vse Slil people simply do command such level of both hatred and admiration which Putin does today."

To be read:"Losers and Vse Slil people simply do NOT command...."

[different clue]

aleksandar,

I have read somewhere that before the sanctions, most of the salmon eaten in Western and Central Russia was farmed salmon imported from mainly Norway. What about in Eastern Russia (Siberia and the Farthest East)? Before sanctions did the people there eat wild-caught Kamchatka or other wild salmon, or did the people way out there also eat Norwegian farmed salmon if they ate any salmon at all?