With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, many commentators have been shocked by Vladimir Putin’s blatant disregard for all norms of international behavior. The sad truth is they should not have been surprised. The stage was set for this tragedy by decades of Putin’s actions, especially in Syria. Unless these lessons of history are analyzed and learned, the international community will continue to compound these grave mistakes — including by entering into a new nuclear deal with Iran.

By 2015, Iran and Russia were doing many horrible things in Syria in order to prop up the murderous regime of the brutal Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad. How did Russia get involved in Syria?

Following the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011 — that began as a popular uprising against the corrupt dictatorship of Assad — things were looking very bad for the survival of the Syrian regime. Given that Iran sees Syria as key to its “Axis of Resistance,” it sent its own forces to help prop up the Assad regime, in addition to Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies.

Iran’s efforts in Syria were coordinated by the notorious Major General Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

According to our profile of Soleimani, “By 2015, the proxy forces marshalled by Soleimani were virtually single-handedly prosecuting the war.”

And yet, that was not enough to ensure the survival of the Assad regime. In 2015, Soleimani went to Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin to ask for Russian intervention to help save the Syrian regime. Putin had already been aiding Assad, but not at the levels that Russia later would. Soleimani’s meeting with Putin was a turning point in the war.

According to a report in Reuters, Soleimani’s 2015 visit to Moscow was “… the first step in planning for a Russian military intervention that has reshaped the Syrian war and forged a new Iranian-Russian alliance in support of Assad.”

By 2015, the Russian air force was already committing war crimes in Syria, in order to demoralize the civilian population. By 2016, reports of the bombing of hospitals and other civilian targets in Aleppo by both Russian and Syrian airplanes began to appear in the international media.

According to an in-depth 2019 report in the New York Times, “Physicians for Human Rights, an advocacy group that tracks attacks on medical workers in Syria, has documented at least 583 such attacks since 2011, 266 of them since Russia intervened in September 2015.”

What was the response of the international community to the war crimes of Iran and Russia in Syria?

In 2015, the international community, led by the Obama administration and the P5+1, negotiated the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

One of the major flaws of the JCPOA is that it did not address Iran’s support for terrorist activities worldwide and terror proxies like Hezbollah, nor did it address Iran’s complicity in supporting the Assad regime in its murder of possibly hundreds of thousands of civilians.

In fact, with the relief of economic sanctions provided by the 2015 JCPOA, Iran actually ended up with more money to pour into Syria.

In 2017 and 2018, the European Union actually increased trade with Russia. Similarly, according to a report of the US government, “U.S. goods and services trade with Russia totaled an estimated $34.9 billion in 2019. Exports were $10.9 billion; imports were $24.0 billion. The U.S. goods and services trade deficit with Russia was $13.1 billion in 2019.”

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