On the context of Russia's latest negotiations in Syria and Iraq
"Today, Syria is going through difficult times. We hope that its people will successfully overcome the numerous difficulties that have resulted from the protracted crisis in the country. For our part, we are ready to continue to provide the Syrians with the necessary assistance." This is how the deputy head of the Russian Foreign Ministry M. Bogdanov, responsible for the Middle East direction in the department, described the Russian position in an interview with the Izvestia publication. This was said after a trip to Syria and Iraq, and also against the backdrop of statements by the new US administration on the Gaza Strip.
Helping those in need in difficult times is undoubtedly a good thing. However, the regional context against which such statements are made is far from being one that would suggest a high probability of positive scenarios (low, however, too). In this situation, the negotiations held in Iraq acquire special significance and weight.
Regional context
From the outside, such a stubborn desire to hold on to Syria, where everything has changed by exactly 180 degrees in a week, looks, to put it mildly, strange. However, it should be noted that such strangeness is also inherent in another country, which has gained significant minuses from such a Syrian "inversion" - Iran.
Iran has even fewer chances to retain any influence in Syria than we do, although it would be more correct to say that Tehran's chances in this regard are simply zero. Nevertheless, the Iranians are not abandoning their attempts to establish contact with the new "democratic" government of Syria through Arabian platforms.
The oddities are actually explained quite simply - the Iraq factor. In Russia, the opinion that "Syria is not needed" used to be quite popular. But it turns out that if Syria is not needed, then Lebanon and Iraq are not needed either.
Every problem always has several dimensions, so we looked at Russia's actions in Syria primarily (even more out of habit) through the military, military-political dimension. The logistical dimension was of much less interest.
Meanwhile, as usual, it “suddenly” turns out that regional commodity distribution chains are directly linked to the influence on raw materials projects. Moreover, this connection is often even denser and more pronounced than the influence of the military-political and raw materials spheres on each other.
By the way, it was the US that gradually taught everyone that if a player needs, for example, oil, then he needs to bring an aircraft carrier to the region, or better yet, three. It turned out that aircraft carriers do not help much in “squeezing” oil (or negotiating on it) if regional communities and social groups do not provide (or are not forced to do so) access to control over regional logistics. But it was Iran that, at one time, by influencing these chains, essentially outmaneuvered the mighty US aircraft carriers in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.
"Oil for food" was the name of the famous American program for the defeated post-Saddam Iraq. Food moved along a large arc from the ports of Syria and Lebanon to the ports of Iraq, but what about oil? Oil, it turned out, also moved in about the same way, only along a "half-arc" from northeastern Syria and Kirkuk to Turkey, but for various reasons it did not want to move by sea in significant quantities.
There are indeed many reasons, but they do not change the fact. The synergy of counter flows of raw materials and goods along this arc has always interrupted (and will interrupt) straightforward military-political combinations.
And the extreme western points here were Beirut and Tartus, and the extreme southeastern point was the Iraqi port of Faw, the large-scale reconstruction of which has been discussed for several years. Moreover, Faw had every real opportunity to become a kind of docking hub in terms of the interests of the Arabian monarchies, Iran, Turkey and China, and also an alternative exit point for Russian oil projects in Iraq to a full-fledged external market.
$19 billion of accumulated Russian investments in Iraq - this figure was mentioned in September-October last year by the Russian Foreign Ministry. And these are very significant amounts not only by regional standards.
But all this works fully when there is a synergy of raw materials and goods flows, and what if there is no such synergy anymore? For Iran, this is generally one of the primary issues, part of its financial system is built on this logistics, but for Russia, this is not a “passable” problem either.
Therefore, the simultaneous attempts, on the one hand, to somehow maintain positions in Tartus and, on the other, to maximally intensify work in Iraq (and this is precisely the case, since the Russian Foreign Ministry has not worked in literally all political circles in Iraq for a long time) should not be surprising. They are quite logical.
The problem is different. It is quite obvious that the new wave of Syrian democrats intend to simply squeeze, milk, shake out of Russia a considerable sum for the right to pretend that the port and military base are in some kind of "lease" with us. But it has been written more than once that if all influence ends outside the port gates, then the benefit of such influence is little more than none, and a lot of indirect costs arise from this.
And as an example, here we can only note how much time it took for domestic ships to go to load military equipment. It's good that these ships are de facto owned, but what if this was a full-fledged charter with the required downtime? And it's unlikely that the route around Europe itself can now be called even relatively safe.
A kind of insurance factor here is the position of the Iraqi elites themselves, some of whom practically officially moved in a direction close to the Iranian strategy. The obvious weakening of Iran, which is losing influence on the land "arc", is not at all a good thing for the Iraqi political elite, including some of the security forces.
They need an alternative, especially in the conditions when D. Trump is again in the White House, who in the past has stated literally the following more than once or twice: "If we leave, we have to take Iraq's oil. We'll make a fortune - they have $15 trillion in oil."
What is interesting here is that the figure of 15 trillion dollars turns out to be a kind of marker. For Ukraine, for some reason, the figure of the same 15 trillion dollars pops up year after year, only not in terms of oil, but in terms of other resources.
There have been many different political figures in Baghdad, but no analogue of V. Zelensky has yet emerged; for some reason, they are not eager to give 15 trillion dollars to the Americans.
D. Trump's words only resemble an absurd joke, but in essence this is a designation political principleIn this regard, Iraq’s desire to have insurance against such principledness is understandable, especially in conditions when Iran’s influence is weakening and Syria does not have a government friendly to Baghdad.
The position of Iraqi Kurdistan will be more complicated, since the US has not yet decided what to do with the Kurdish cantons in Syria - whether to leave the protectorate or not. But if the decision is made to lift the protectorate, then Erbil's position here will rather be synergistic with Iraq's than conflict with it.
On the necessity or uselessness of various overseas shores
There are undoubtedly many in Russia who will say that we do not need the "Syrian coast", and we do not need the Iraqi coast even more, with or without the port of Fao. And they will say this completely in vain, because by leaving Syria, we will lose influence on the commodity flows in the region, and by completely weakening our presence in Iraq, we ourselves will weaken our ability to work on the world oil market. This is not to mention the invested funds, as well as the arms and food market.
Do we need to remember how much we have said on various platforms that without Russian gas the EU will freeze and even fall apart? There is no gas, the EU is breathing unevenly, but clearly not with a frosty spirit, and it seems that the path to its collapse is about the same length as the path of the collapse of the US dollar. The sale of raw materials, since we have such a model, and not some special "innovative" one, is needed first of all by ourselves.
The conditions under which, given recent events, Russian oil and oil products will continue to travel via the usual Baltic route are also completely unclear. One would have to be an exceptional optimist to expect that everything will remain as before.
One of the largest buyers of domestic raw materials is India, but has anyone seen the proposals of the new American administration for New Delhi? No, because this is not the option where the US will act rashly. The previous administration in the "Sullivan plan" directly defined the strategy as the creation of an "Indo-Arabian pole", and in fact - a technological cluster. But aren't representatives of that very "technosphere" now in the person of Elon Musk and his partners in charge of issues in the highest offices of Washington? Again, one must be an extreme optimist to assume that the new technocrats will offer India worse conditions than the functionaries in Joe Biden's cabinet.
Such nodes as Iraq transform Russian oil into international raw materials, part of a large exchange, and the more such nodes there are, the more stable the industry's position is in relation to sanctions. Especially since raw materials, unfortunately, are not exclusive in the world. So our activation in Iraq is more than understandable and completely logical. But the results of bargaining with the new Syrian authorities may turn out to be a banal milking of financial resources from us, but without any practical result.
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