Last week when I was considering all the motivations that Vladimir Putin might have to entangle himself in the Syrian quagmire, I considered that he might be doing it for domestic political reasons. Well, about that…
The Levada poll said that 69 percent either firmly oppose or probably oppose deploying troops to help the Syrian leadership, while 67 percent back Russian “political and diplomatic support” for Assad’s government.
It said that 43 percent support providing Damascus with weapons and military consultation — as Moscow has been doing throughout a more than four-year conflict that has killed some 250,000 people — while 41 percent oppose it.
So yeah, I was wrong. I figured Russian public opinion on Syrian escalation wouldn’t sour unless Russian soldiers started getting killed, but it turns out that public opinion on this issue is already sour.
There are a couple of things at play. First, “sending in troops,” if that phrase was really in the survey language, could mean different things to different people, and it’s possible that the 69% number might come down a little if “only airstrikes” was specified. But it probably wouldn’t come down by much, given that only 43% even support arming and advising the Syrians, which is a step short of airstrikes. Second, this shows that the Russian public’s appetite for foreign military adventures clearly stops at Russia’s near abroad. They’re OK (at least for now) with Russian intervention in Ukraine, but Syria doesn’t have the same appeal. Distance is surely part of the distinction there, but don’t discount bad memories of the last time a “Russian” (Soviet in this case) government got itself tied up in a mostly Muslim country.
These obviously aren’t favorable numbers for Putin, who depends on his (carefully engineered) popularity to keep Russia’s oligarchs from tossing him out of office (say, the Russian political system is more like ours than we know!), so he’ll need to tread carefully. This same poll finds that 39% of respondents (a plurality) don’t favor either side in Syria, so they’re not likely to support an operation that sacrifices Russian soldiers and resources to prop up Assad. Maybe fortunately for Putin, a third of the respondents said that they don’t care enough about Syria to pay attention to what’s happening there, but that number will undoubtedly go up along with this operation’s price tag (or if something happens to a Russian soldier or pilot).
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