Die Ukraine-Syrien Connection

Was der Krieg in Syrien mit der Ukraine zu tun und er für die Zukunft Syrien bedeutet, fasst Al-Monitor so zusammen:​​​

• The Russian attack on Ukraine last month has diverted the international community’s already fading attention from the now 11-year civil war in Syria.

• UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, addressing the Security Council on March 23, said that Syrians feel "abandoned by the world" after a decade of war.

• Russia is the primary backer of the Syrian government. Moscow’s military intervention in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has secured Assad’s hold on power in a fragile and divided country.

• Israel coordinates its Syria policy, including intermittent attacks on Iran and Iranian-backed armed groups, with Russia.

• Russia, now fully engaged with the war in Ukraine, may provide an opening for Turkey, and perhaps others, to press their agendas in Syria.

UN: Syria destruction ‘has few equals’ in modern history

• On March 11, Guterres reminded the Security Council that "the destruction that Syrians have endured is so extensive and deadly that it has few equals in modern history. … There must be no impunity."

• "Hundreds of thousands have been killed, more than half of the pre-war population – somewhere in the order of 22 million - have been displaced," said Paulo Pinheiro, Chair of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, on March 9. "More than 100,000 are missing or forcibly disappeared. Syria’s cities and infrastructure have been destroyed. Today the poverty rate in Syria is an unprecedented 90%; 14.6 million people in Syria depend on humanitarian aid.”

• "Nearly 5 million children have been born in Syria since 2011," said UNICEF Syria Representative, Bo Viktor Nylund said in March. "They have known nothing but war and conflict. In many parts of Syria, they continue to live in fear of violence, landmines, and explosive remnants of war."

Syria ranks among the 10 most food-insecure countries globally, with “a staggering 12 million people considered to be food insecure,” Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator Joyce Msuya reported to the Council, while noting that the country’s economy is “spiraling further downward.”  

• Sultan Al-Kanj reports on the impact of higher food and fuel costs on Syrians in Idlib.

UN envoy: Parties ‘substantively far apart’ on flagging political process

• The only way to break that deadlock, Guterres said, is through a credible political process that forges a sustainable peace and lets the voices of all Syrians be heard.

• But the political process outlined in UN Security 2254 (2015) has been so delayed, and obstructed, that it sounds out of time and place with Syria today.  And that was before the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, one of the key players in the Syrian drama.

• UN Syria Envoy Geir Pedersen told the Security Council in February that he is "very concerned that the constructive international diplomacy required to push this may prove more difficult than it already was, against the backdrop of the military operations in Ukraine."

• The political negotiations are mostly dominated by Moscow, and by extension Damascus, with no countervailing US or Western engagement to give Pedersen the leverage needed to press ahead with his "step-for-step" approach to negotiations. 

• "The parties' positions are substantively far apart, and narrowing their differences will inevitably be an incremental process," Pedersen told the Security Council.