When Vladimir Putin announced on Monday that Russia would withdraw its "main" military forces from Syria starting the very next day, it seemed to have come out of nowhere. Russia has been bombing in Syria for six months, and had helped Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad make real territorial gains. There had been few indications that Moscow had any plans to stop.
But it makes a lot more sense when you see what Russia has accomplished in Syria — and what it hasn't. Here's an overview of how Russia's six-month intervention changed the Syrian civil war, how it didn't, and what it means for the war.
Russia brought Assad back from the brink
Before Russia intervened, Assad was losing ground in the war.
Much of these losses came about a year ago. In March of 2015, Assad's forces were pushed out of Idlib city, the regional capital of Idlib province. The next month, rebels took Jisr al-Shughour, a strategically valuable town that lies on the Assad regime's supply line in the area and near its important coastal holdings in Latakia province.
According to Michael Hanna, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, these gains were particularly threatening to Assad. That's because they took place in what he calls "useful Syria": heavily populated, urban, and strategically valuable areas in Syria's north and west.
These areas contain the overwhelming majority of Syria's Alawites, the minority Shia sect to which Bashar al-Assad and much of his regime belong. If he couldn't hold on to that territory, he probably couldn't hold on anywhere. As the rebels continued to make gains throughout the summer, the Russians seemed to worry that Assad's hold over Syria was at risk.
"The reason the Russians intervened is because they were so alarmed by the progress being made on the ground in useful Syria," Hanna says, "that they believed might [rebels might] eventually threaten the collapse of the regime."
So when Putin intervened in September, sending airplanes and military specialists, his principal goal was stopping the rebel momentum in the north and west.
In that, he's succeeded.
"They've stopped the advances that you've been seeing through Idlib and Latakia," Julien Barnes-Dacey, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, explains. "First and foremost, this was about consolidating the regime, making sure it didn't fall, it didn't concede more ground."
Russia's intervention, by bombarding rebel positions as well as providing trained operators to help the Syrians employ heavy artillery and tanks, has even put the rebels on the defensive in certain areas.
"We've seen some quite significant advances up near Latakia province, up toward Aleppo," Barnes-Dacey says. "They've secured a lot of ground in the core strip up near Homs and Hama, and they've obviously made a big gain in the south of late in Sheikh [Miskin]."
The bottom line is that Russia intervened to stop the rebels' momentum against Assad, and it worked.
Russia was mostly just able to maintain the status quo of a Syrian stalemate
The problem, however, is that these gains are far more limited than they might at first seem.
David Kenner, an editor at Foreign Policy, tweeted these two maps that had been assembled by longtime Syria watcher Thomas van Linge. One shows Syria's state of play just before the Russian intervention; another shows Syria today. I've put them back to back in the below slider; see if you can spot the Assad regime's gains (yellow) at the expense of the main rebel groups (green):
Seems pretty minimal, right? Experts agree.
Russia allowed the regime "to consolidate its hold on core Syria," Barnes-Dacey says. But "they haven't done enough to really put outright victory on the horizon."
That's because, quite simply, the Russians cannot win the war for Assad. All they can really do is prop him up and maintain the status quo of a divided, stalemated Syria.
The key problem is manpower. At the beginning of the civil war in 2011 and 2012, Assad's military suffered from mass defections. He was never able to replace those trained troops, many of whom defected to the rebels, with trained troops. This just gets harder as the war goes on: Assad is losing troops in combat while military-age men flee Syria to avoid the draft.
"This manpower issue is critical and chronic," Hanna says. "These temporary infusions of men from abroad — Hezbollah, Shia militias from Iraq, Afghans, and others — these are stopgaps."
This doesn't mean an Assad defeat is inevitable: The rebels have their own problems. Rather, it means that Assad just isn't in a position to defeat the rebels outright, making a stalemate the best outcome Russia could hope to accomplish militarily.
"From the very beginning, when people were talking loudly about what Russia could accomplish on the ground, it was clear that they couldn't retake the whole country," Hanna says.
Military means toward a political end
The smarter move, instead, is to cut off the cycle of escalation: to draw down your military efforts before the offensive hits its limits and try to negotiate some type of diplomatic agreement at a time when your proxy is looking stronger. In other words, it wasn't about delivering Assad total victory but giving him — and Russia — a better position in a negotiated settlement to the war.
And indeed, it looks like that what Putin is doing. Russia helped the US broker a partial ceasefire in Syria, one that's holding better than most people expected. There are negotiations ongoing in Geneva about Syria's future.
Russia's withdrawal, if it actually happens in part or in whole, would be more evidence that Russia is turning away from its military campaign and toward a political endgame.
"The military tools have always been there for the pursuit of a political goal," Barnes-Dacey says. "In many respects, the political process that's unfolding now is being set on Russian terms."