Russia’s War on Ukraine: A Challenge To Regional And Global Security

Milestone 2011

• The process that started with the 2011 Arab uprisings continues with the end of the Assad regime in Syria on the morning of December 8, 2024.
• What made the 2011 uprisings a historic beginning was that they targeted the paradigm that maintained the Middle East status quo.
• This paradigm was the common denominator on which Arab countries derived the legitimacy to govern.
• Arab regimes, whether manifested in so-called traditional dynastic or republican structures, were all clique regimes of varying scale and depth, all of which consolidated their power by claiming to act on behalf of the people. This basic structure was preserved in the transition of a number of Arab countries from dynasties to one-party republics in the mid-twentieth century. Anti-imperialism and the Arab-Israeli conflict formed the external perception dimension of the regimes’ claim to legitimacy, and the struggle on these grounds was presented as a process of meeting the demands of the people on behalf of the people, thus creating a bubble in which “crackpot” voices were not tolerated internally. When friendly or hostile Arab regimes looked at each other, they saw that they were standing on the same ground and drew strength from this. This was essentially the Arab status quo.
• The total inability of the Arab regimes to resolve the Palestinian question, which is at the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict, cracked the fan. On the other hand, the popular excitement of deriving nationalism from the same Arab identity as individual states could only go so far. Islam began to gain a political platform as a core value. The 1979 Iranian revolution took this trend to a new level. Even though Iran is based on a different sect and historical religion-state pattern, the very fact that such a revolution was possible affected the Arab geography. In Afghanistan, the rise of the US and Gulf-backed mujahideen resistance against the Soviet occupation consolidated the new environment. Islamism quickly took on a violent dimension and its distinction with Salafist jihadism became blurred.
• Regimes realized that the conditions for deriving legitimacy had changed and started to act on religious references and emphases. However, in this way, they accepted the competition on the Islamists’ playing field. Because, albeit inadequately, they rendered invisible all other references that constitute the modern state’s link to its society. They facilitated the spread of Islamist networks locally in an environment where even the smallest dissent is ruthlessly suppressed, while religious sentiment and solidarity can be a refuge. These regimes told their domestic public opinion and the outside world that these religious fanatics would replace them if they were gone, and they were convincing. This is how the self-fulfilling prophecy unfolded.
• For a century, however, Arab countries have experienced economic development and social progress driven by cities. Urban populations have grown outside the hierarchical structures and constraints of regimes. As their demands have diversified and increased, governments that had consolidated as security states and devoted much of their budgets to maintaining this structure have been even less able to meet them. Cities have become centers where working, educated masses, tired of poverty and oppression, have begun to swell in an environment of tightening global communication networks. The social explosion, delayed for a while due to the rigidification caused by the perception of fragility that the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 increased among Arab regimes, finally materialized in 2010-2011, when the 2008 global financial crisis further aggravated the living conditions of Arab peoples.
• When the uprising sparked in Tunisia spread to Egypt, the region was on an irreversible path. Egypt had always been an inspiration to other Arab countries, whether it was the common culture, the experience of the modern state that began in the 19th century, constitutionalism, putschism, singlepartyism, republicanism or Islamism. On top of that, the forced resignation of a thirty-year autocrat like Mubarak after a brief Tahrir resistance raised hopes and encouragement across the region.
• It was in Tahrir Square that the region experienced the rupture that cannot be seen on the surface. The Muslim Brotherhood entered the square only after 8-10 days, and then only in small groups. The delay was not due to a tactical need to sniff the air. The demands of the Tahrir revolutionaries were dignity and freedom. They were demanding universal rights, not a new hierarchy in the fiction of religion. In that moment of reality, it became clear that Islamism was also within the old regime paradigm, its mirror image.
• However, the opportunity was not yet lost. With the secular opposition brutally crushed, the Islamists had the only network of organizations that existed with the regime’s limited tolerance. Indeed, they took advantage of this in the first elections held under the auspices of the military. Within a year, however, the Tahrir revolutionaries had had enough of Morsi’s partisanship, and the army took advantage of the general atmosphere of confusion and dissatisfaction to stage a coup. Against the general background of these developments, it can be seen that the established regime guardians and the Islamists had, for a while, switched shifts in order to extinguish the people’s fire for freedom. The old paradigm had fulfilled its function for the time being.

Regional fire

• At the beginning of the process, only three North African countries and Yemen saw a change of government, but the regional status quo, based on the perception of regime durability, also collapsed. The states that had not yet been reached by the flames of revolution correctly recognized that it was on its way. They sought to prevent it from reaching their borders. Saudi Arabia’s military intervention in Bahrain is the first example of “forward defense” in the wider region.
• However, the main battleground has been Syria. The brutal suppression of the 2011 popular demonstrations there led to a rapid degeneration of the situation towards armed conflict. The Assad regime thought it could dominate the situation in the only way it knew how, failing to realize that conflict positions were being reshaped in the region. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf partners moved to find full-time work for the jihadist Salafists who might cause unrest at home, to degenerate the revolution away from the people, to put Assad in his place and to show their own people that the naive quest for rights had no chance of being realized. In Türkiye, the Turkish government has expanded its role in the field, initially through the Muslim Brotherhood, with Salafist jihadists (the geopolitical, security, demographic, economic and social fabric problems that this involvement has caused for Türkiye over the years, which the public has witnessed up close and personal, will not be addressed in this article). Iran, and later Russia and the United States, joined the war as extra-regional powers.
• The emergence of ISIS in the central part of the Syria-Iraq geography with the consolidation of jihadists, the transformation of the fight against this formation into a parallel war, the sensational terrorist attacks in European capitals and finally the massive influx of refugees from Syria were the main preoccupations of the outside world, especially the West, and no one looked at the developments in a causal way.
• Since 2017, when the Assad regime, with the help of Iran, its proxy forces and Russia, re-established its control over two-thirds of the country, regional players have seen the limits of their influence. But more importantly, they recognized the tendency for the regional war to expand beyond Syria’s dimensions, especially with the developing situation in Yemen. It was against this backdrop that Türkiye, Russia and Iran agreed on the de-escalation.

Fear is useless 

• A common weakness of authoritarian regimes is that they rely on results achieved through coercion and violence. However, the relativity of success achieved in this way is obvious. This is because the essence of the problem has been avoided and only the space for action has been suppressed. This pressure can be neutralized, especially in multivariate environments.
• Indeed, the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, triggered by Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, turned into a general campaign of Israeli annihilation, largely destroying the military and militia platforms Iran had built up in the region over 30 years. Russia downsized its military presence in Syria in order to maintain its aggression in Ukraine, while Assad thought he was returning to the old days. However, the eco-system provided by the de-escalation arrangement has proved to be his undoing.
• At the threshold of change, the role of the military deserves special mention. The armed forces are the most visible power profile of authoritarian regimes and are seen as their ultimate insurance. However, this centrality is a paradox of the regime. Loyalty to the tyrant is based on the perception that he protects his authority going forward. If that perception is weakened, the army, as an institution, thinks about its future, remembering that compulsory military service keeps the people and the army together. The repositioning of the armies in Iran in 1979, Tunisia in 2010 and Egypt in 2011 took an average of two weeks each. In Syria in 2024, the army melted away.

Where to?

• The fact that this result was achieved largely under the leadership of an armed organization with a history of al-Qaeda and ISIS rightly raises serious concerns among all democrats about the direction in which governance in the country may evolve. The examples of the Iranian revolution and the Taliban in Afghanistan come to mind.
• If it comes down to the hands of HTS and its ilk, these concerns are entirely justified. Islamism and Salafism are very similar in their anti-historical doctrines and jihadist practices. Their ideology is totalitarian, it is where they seek refuge when they are in trouble, so it should not be assumed that they can be tamed on their own.
• Let’s go back to the beginning. In Egypt, the authoritarian hierarchical paradigm was kept in place by the guardians of the establishment and the Brotherhood. In Tunisia, the Islamists realized early on that they were out of their depth in the new environment and agreed to meet on the ground of a constitutional order based on universal rights and freedoms. But this time the guardians of the established order could not digest the democratic process. In other words, new balances that would break both wings’ hold on the old paradigm have not yet emerged there.
• The collapse of the Syrian regime, on the other hand, has destroyed this paradigm along with the established order. It is not possible for Islamist groups to revive the same paradigm by confronting those who seek pluralism and freedom. They can only resort to brute repression. Similarly, while it is possible that the competition for dominance among multiple factions could turn into a new spiral of conflict, as in Libya and Yemen (or the evolution of Sunnis who lost their dominant position in Iraq under the US occupation into al-Qaeda), giving it more weight than it deserves would be rash and decontextualize the reading of the terrain. First and foremost, the people and groups in Syria have at least a decade of experience in the process of change, which has been characterized by the heaviest destruction and losses. In the new environment, just as HTS and its allied groups will quickly distance themselves from their external supporters, including Türkiye, after gaining ground in Syria, their leading to the overthrow of the regime will enable other liberated sectors and groups in the country to open their own space. It is important to think about how this process will work without losing morale.
• Moreover, Syria’s location and characteristics make it difficult in many respects to compare the process ahead with what is happening in Iran and Afghanistan. It should not be forgotten that the chances of success of Islamist impulses depend on geopolitics and social background. The great powers’ long-standing treatment of Afghanistan as a buffer has kept the country trapped in a paradigm of patriarchal hierarchy despite its rich internal fabric. In Iran, those allied against the Shah fell into the trap of using the mullahs’ network infrastructure, which could not be questioned by the regime. It should be remembered that Iran became a Shia state under the Safavids in the 16th century, not in 1979. Moreover, in the Cold War conditions of the 1970s, the question was not how the country would be governed but by whom. Syria, on the other hand, is a microcosm of the Middle East, historically centralized and open to the outside world, but also internally diverse and with different neighbors. These are beyond the capacity of the likes of HTS.
• The fall of Assad provided a “clean slate”. If a pluralist alliance to counterbalance the Islamists can be built and expanded, it will be the first step towards democratic transformation.
• Thus begins the third round of the process that began with the 2011 uprisings, after uprisings and regional wars. It is impossible for regimes whose impotence in the eyes of their peoples has been exposed by the wars in Gaza and Lebanon not to be worried about Assad’s sudden fall. Their people are only silent out of desperation, not out of loyalty to their regimes. In 2021, the mass demonstrations witnessed from Baghdad to Casablanca essentially signaled that regimes that thought they could overcome their impotence through internal repression would no longer be tolerated by their people.
• If the government in Türkiye takes an ideological view of the developments in Syria and thinks that it can revive the regional Islamist transformation that it was convinced had failed in 2013, it will lose from the start. The region is not as it was in 2013, nor are the groups that the government provided shelter to, but which are now consolidating their territorial dominance in their countries, as close to it as they were before December 8. Moreover, it is not hard to see that a fragmented and disputed organization with a questionable reputation that uses a title with national pretensions such as “Syrian National Army” under the auspices of Türkiye will not have a long future in a process in which Syrians take charge of their own destiny. The weight of the exiled opposition, some of which resides in Istanbul, on the Syrian ground today is questionable. These events reveal once again how vital the democratic and secular rule of law, which is the basis of the Republic of Türkiye, is.

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The parliamentary elections held in Georgia last week were won, as expected, by the political party Georgian Dream, which has been in power for 12 years, with 54 per cent of the votes. The 4 opposition parties combined received around 38 per cent of the vote. The European Union and the United States strongly objected to the election results. They claimed that various irregularities were found in the casting and counting of votes and demanded a proper investigation. The day after the elections, the president declared that he would not recognise the illegitimate results and called on opposition voters to take to the streets. Responding to the call, the masses filled the squares of Tbilisi and challenged the government and the election results.

Solidified opposition challenges election results, says Russia stole our victory

President Salome Zourabichvili, appearing on a French television programme, claimed that the election results did not reflect the will of the people, that the people who filled the streets at his call rejected the results, and that the fraudulent election victory of the government was a ‘special operation’ carried out by Russia against Georgia; he called on Georgia’s western partners for help. On the other hand, the government, taking into account the internal and external reactions it faced, announced that an investigation would be carried out in voting centres, which accounted for 14% of all polling stations. In light of the developments, the Prosecutor General summoned the president to testify with documents on the corruption he had mentioned.

Georgians sandwiched between Brussels and Moscow

The anomaly is clearly visible, isn’t it? Georgia is being pulled from the right by the West and especially the European Union through the president, and from the left by Russia through the government. Don’t the unfortunate Georgian people feel uncomfortable with the ‘sandwich’ situation they have fallen into? They are probably aware of the pathetic situation. The day after the elections, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban visited Tbilisi and congratulated him on his election victory. Amidst the EU’s objections, he sent a message to the Georgian Dream government: ‘Don’t be manipulated by Brussels and turn Russia against you, keep your neutrality in the war in Ukraine, don’t get into trouble, and in the meantime continue on your way to the EU’. The visit of the rebel EU leader was a slap in the face for the opposition parties.

European Union denies that Georgia is Russia’s backyard

It is clear that the European Union’s policy in Georgia ignores the recent political history of the region, is blind to geostrategic realities and jeopardises the peace and stability of the country. In the aftermath of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, Brussels wants to use the Georgian opposition to isolate and wear down Moscow, which is why the country was declared a candidate country. In neighbouring Georgia, we are witnessing a European Union that is provoking the opposition with all its might by declaring the ruling party, which has included membership of the European Union and NATO as a national goal in the country’s constitution, as pro-Russian. If the opposition had won the elections and come to power, its first step would probably have been to join the EU sanctions against Russia.

Salome Zourabichvili: Brussels’ Trojan horse in Georgia

Let us not forget that the founder of the opposition’s leading party, the United National Movement, is Miheil Sakashvili, the former president who got Georgia into trouble with big neighbour Russia in 2008. Thanks to this party, we know that South Ossetia is out of Tbilisi’s control. The other element of the opposition that does not inspire confidence is the president Salome Zourabichvili. This lady is a Frenchwoman, who served in the French Foreign Ministry for 30-odd years. Due to her Georgian roots, she was appointed ambassador of France to Tbilisi in 2003 and then, with the approval of Miheil Sakashvili, became Georgia’s foreign minister. In my opinion, this promotion is a political show. What would a person who has spent 30 years defending French interests do as the president of Georgia when the interests of his country and France diverge? Anyway, Salome’s term of office will expire at the end of the year. I have not forgotten that a colleague who knows the region called him the Trojan horse of the EU in Georgia. The reason why he has been working as a member of the opposition for a few years is personal political investment, he must be afraid of falling off the political stage.

Who ignores Moscow cannot sit in Tbilisi

It should not be inferred from the above remarks that I am against the pro-EU opposition in neighbouring Georgia and support the ruling Georgian Dream government. First of all, let us stress that all political parties in the neighbouring country, except for one or two marginal ones, are pro-EU. 85 per cent of the population is in favour of Brussels. The problem is that the opposition has become the EU’s plaything and pawn and does not take into account the might of the big neighbour to the north. The frightening neighbour holds the keys to the territories lost by Georgia (Abkhazia and South Ossetia), one out of every four tourists visiting the country is Russian, wine is exported to Russia, Georgians working in Russia send money to their families. Let’s ask the following question: Can a Mexican politician govern his country without paying any attention to his superpower neighbour to the north, the USA? A similar situation is also valid in Georgia. It is a bitter truth that Russia has become a super neighbour that is disliked, feared and avoided in Georgia due to the developments during and after the USSR period. Wise Georgian politicians know very well that it is imperative to maintain relations with Moscow without confronting or challenging Russia. Any deviation from this geopolitical reality will lead to big problems. The ruling Georgian Dream wants EU membership without causing trouble for the country. Brussels says there is no such thing as free membership.

There is no doubt that the Georgian government has become authoritarian after 12 years

It is obvious that after 12 years the Georgian Dream government is becoming increasingly authoritarian. They are uncomfortable with opposition parties, opposition press and the activities of opposition non-governmental organisations. As a remedy, they think of silencing them by force. In this context, it is even alleged that during the campaign period they declared that they envisage banning opposition parties after winning the elections. Personally, I do not think they would make such a gigantic antidemocratic mistake. The law on ‘acting in the interests of a foreign power’, a Russian-like measure against foreign funding of the media and NGOs, is cited as evidence of the authoritarianisation of the government. Probably, there are pool media and partisan media in Georgia as in our country. When opposition groups have to rely on foreign funds to make their voices heard, they must be accused of being ‘funders’. Is the situation different in Turkey, which became an EU candidate in 1999 and started accession negotiations in 2005?

To surrender or not to surrender to Brussels on the European journey

Having worked in Belgrade, following Serbia and getting to know Aleksandar Vucic, I liken the Georgian leadership to that of this Balkan country. Both of them are orientated towards Brussels, but they are realistic, they say no to Russophobia, they want to make the journey towards Brussels without surrendering, without losing their identity, at least this is their endeavour. Well, Belgrade and Tbilisi have many faults. They do not have a strong belief in democracy, they cannot close their doors to corruption, they cannot tolerate the opposition press, their record on law and human rights is weak. But what is the situation in Turkey, an EU candidate for 25 years, a G20 country that has established a customs union with the EU and started accession negotiations 20 years ago? Do you see any difference? At least Serbs and Georgians are exempt from visas.