What is the Russian Public Reaction to Turkey Downing Its War Plane?

Vox.com
November 24, 2015

Mark Galeotti, a professor at NYU's Center for Global Affairs who focuses on Russia:

The first indications are that there's a definite surge of public anger. They only know what the Kremlin is going to tell them, which is that this was a Turkish attack on a Russian plane over Syria while it was trying to bomb terrorist targets. All Putin's rhetoric about being stabbed in the back will have resonance, particularly because Russians — even more so than many other people — are very conscious of their history.

Russia has a long pre-Soviet history of rivalry with the Turkish Ottoman Empire and a sense that the Turks are not to be trusted, rooted in crude cultural stereotypes. But one has to realize that it's not as though they're demanding war: They can, to a large extent, be modulated and, if need be, distracted through the state-controlled media. I don't think this is, in any meaningful sense, a constraint on the Kremlin.

In Russia, the whole Syrian adventure has been played as "strike the terrorists in Syria before we have to fight them in Russia." It's been sold as an operation that's tremendously successful. You could argue with how effective the airstrikes are — let's be honest, the best the Russian airstrikes can do is slightly slow the rate at which Assad is losing the war; they won't turn the tide. But that's not how it's being sold in Moscow. Finally, it's been sold as a safe operation: no large ground troop commitments, the Russians are doing everything at arm's length away from danger.

One plane being shot down — and by another country, not the rebels — is not going to change that last element. But it really does point to the fact that if the Russians do start taking losses, losses they can't paper over with their propaganda machine, then there are risks that this will quite quickly become less popular.

Turkey has — at best — been a frenemy to Moscow. Under Erdogan, Turkey has embarked on a campaign to assert itself as a regional power, to essentially acquire a sphere of influence, and, in the process, it is inevitably challenging and competing with Moscow.

Putin is much more concerned with that political dimension than the military one.

This predates Syria. I remember when I was in Azerbaijan, there were a whole variety of actors competing there, very clearly including Turkey. Turkey was making quite a push [to the chagrin of] the Russians. There's actually a long history of rivalry in the modern era; the Russians have clearly infringed on Turkish sovereignty, including the assassination of Chechen rebel fundraisers on Turkish soil by what were almost certainly Russian intelligence officers.

Relations are unlikely to change, then, because they've always been quite tense and antagonistic.

Moscow is not looking for an open-ended, much less an expanded, military effort in Syria. The purpose of the air attacks is, more than anything else, to place Moscow within the decision-making cycle about what happens in Syria. What the Russians are actually looking for is to be some part of a political settlement.

Now, a political settlement would actually see Assad go — the Russians are probably the only people who can get Assad out of Damascus peaceably and offer him sanctuary in Russia. It would also include the creation of some kind of political settlement, including the rebels and the Alawite elite. That's the only way you're going to get enough combatants on the ground in Syria to actually take on the Islamic State.

Putin is much more concerned with that political dimension than the military one — he wants to be moving on that political dimension as soon as possible. And thanks to the Paris attacks, it looked like the momentum was actually going his way. This shoot-down could stymie efforts at reaching a West-Russia deal, or it could make it more urgent. We really don't know at this stage.