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Israpundit » Blog Archive » Russia’s new Middle Eastern role.

By David P. Goldman, ME FORUM

Russia has thrown a monkey wrench into Western plans for Syria by promising to deliver its top-of-the-line S300 surface-to-air missile system to the Bashar al-Assad government. Exactly when the missiles might arrive remains unclear; the last word from Moscow is that the missiles are not yet in place, which means the matter is up for bargaining.

It is humiliating for the West to trip over a game-changing Russian technology nearly a quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The larger scandal is that the West lacks countermeasures against the Russian system, the result of misguided defense priorities over the past dozen years. If the United States had spent a fraction of the resources it wasted in nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan on anti-missile technology, Russia would lack the bargaining chip in the first place. That’s spilt milk, however, and the pressing question is: what should the West do now?

The right way to go about this, I believe, is to draw a bright line between Russia’s opportunistic meddling in Middle Eastern affairs and existential issues for the Russian state. Much as we may dislike the way the Russians manage their affairs, it isn’t within the power of the West to change the character of the Russian regime.

What does Moscow want in the Middle East? It has taken a more active interest in the region’s malefactors of late. Jean Aziz of Al-Monitor argues that Russian Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov’s April 28 meeting with Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon marks a turn in Russia’s relationship with the Hezbollah. Russia’s new alliance-that seems to be the right word-with the Lebanese terrorist organization implies a Russian commitment to carving out a sphere of influence.

On the other hand, Russia does not seem to want a full-blown alliance with the Iranian regime and its Syrian satrap. Iran is present suing Russia for failing to deliver the promised S300 system at the same time that Russia claims that it is sending the same system to Syria. Russia’s refusal to honor its contract with Tehran is a signal that the Putin regime would not be heartbroken if someone were to obliterate Iran’s nuclear bomb-making capacity. Russia has no interest in helping a fanatical regime deploy nuclear weapons on its southern flank.

On the other hand, Russia’s support for the Assad regime is a fact of life. Russia may enjoy the paralysis of the West in the region and seek to embarrass the United States and its allies, but that is a secondary matter. It also may want to demonstrate to the world that it doesn’t abandon allies the way that the United States abandoned former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Again, that is a minor matter. Russia’s interest in the outcome of the Syrian civil war stems from two critical interests.

The lesser of these is the naval supply station at Tartus, which supports the expansion of Russia’s naval presence in the Eastern Mediterranean. The more important concern is Russia’s fear of the Sunni jihadists who dominate the rebel opposition.

Russia has been fighting a brutal war against jihadists in the northern Caucasus for 20 years, punctuated by some of the most horrendous terrorist acts ever perpetrated, including the 2004 slaughter of 380 hostages on North Ossetia, mainly small schoolchildren. The term “paranoid Russian” may be a pleonasm, but in this case Russia has a great deal to be paranoid about. Caucasus terrorism spilled over into the United States with the Boston marathon bombing.

“In Russia, most analysts, politicians and ordinary citizens believe in the unlimited might of America, and thus reject the notion that the US has made, and continues to make, mistakes in the [Middle East]. Instead, they assume it’s all a part of a complex plan to restructure the world and to spread global domination,” wrote Fyodor Lukyanov on the Al Monitor website March 19.

Lukyanov, who chairs Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, dismisses this sort of thinking as a “conspiracy theory”. But he is quite serious in his account of the Putin government’s frame of mind. The Russian elite really think that the United States is creating chaos in the Middle East as a matter of geopolitical intent. Lukyanov wrote:

From Russian leadership’s point of view, the Iraq War now looks like the beginning of the accelerated destruction of regional and global stability, undermining the last principles of sustainable world order. Everything that’s happened since – including flirting with Islamists during the Arab Spring, US policies in Libya and its current policies in Syria – serve as evidence of strategic insanity that has taken over the last remaining superpower.

It is impossible to persuade Vladimir Putin that the Middle East policies of the past two American administrations were merely stupid, because Putin doesn’t believe that stupid people rule great powers. All the stupid people he met are dead. From the Obama administration’s vantage point, chaos in the Middle East is a matter for hand-wringing by the likes of anti-genocide crusader Samantha Power, now the designated ambassador to the United Nations. From the Russian point of view, it is an existential threat.

The ethnic Russian population is declining, and Russia well may have a Muslim majority by mid-century. If chaos envelops the Muslim world on its southern border, it may spread to Russia via the northern Caucasus. During the Cold War, America supported jihadis in Afghanistan and elsewhere to make trouble for the Soviet Empire (and properly so, because the Soviet threat to American security outweighed any inconvenience the US might suffer at the hands of jihadists). Russia is convinced that America still intends to promote jihad in order to destabilize its old Cold War opponent.

How should America respond?

First, the US should back the partition of Syria into a Sunni majority state and an Alawite rump state in the northwestern quadrant of the country, where the Russian navy station happens to be located. The Kurds should get autonomy, just like their Iraqi compatriots.

Turkey will object vociferously because it would advance Kurdish independence, which Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan views the way Captain Hook viewed the crocodile. Too bad for the Turks: someone has to lose here, and it might as well be they. Partition is the only way to stop the civil war and avoid mass murder in its wake. Total victory by either side would be followed by massacres. The most humane solution is a breakup on the precedent of the former Yugoslavia. Assad can remain in power in a rump state where the Alawites will be safe from Sunni reprisals, and the Russians can keep their fueling station. One wonders why the “responsibility to protect” crowd in Washington hasn’t considered that.

Second, the US should use its influence with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to clean out the nastier jihadist elements among Syria’s Sunni rebels. It should also make clear to the Russians that it will not interfere with their counter-terrorist operations in the Caucasus, grisly as these might be.

Third, the US should attack Iran and destroy its nuclear weapons capability and key Revolutionary Guard bases (and perhaps a few other things; various American flag officers have they own list of druthers).

Neutralizing Iran is the key: it eliminates the pipeline of support from Iran to Assad and various terrorist organizations, and reduces them to obnoxious but strategically unemployed local players.

Russia evidently has fewer objections to an American air strike on Iran than on Damascus. It has signaled this as clearly as it can by refusing to deliver the S300 system to the Iranian regime while promising to deliver it to the Syrian regime. The bad news is that we cannot extract Russia from the region; America has made too many blunders in the region to turn the clock back.

The good news is that the problems occasioned by Russia’s enhanced role can be localized and contained. Basher al-Assad and his Alawite army bottled up in a redoubt would be an annoyance, not a strategic threat. A Sunni regime with a Kurdish autonomy zone in the remainder of the country would be susceptible to Western pressure to purge the more dangerous jihadists.

In fact, Russia has fewer objections to an American attack on Iran’s nuclear program and foreign subversion capacity than does the Obama administration. It is painful to read American conservative Jeremiads against the resurgence of Russian influence in the Middle East, when few American conservatives openly propose a strike against Iran. They are afraid that voters don’t trust them with guns after the poor results of the Iraq and Afghanistan nation-building campaigns.

It is much easier to rally the troops by shouting “The Russians are coming!” than to point out that the Obama administration’s ideological aversion to using force against Iran is the core problem. In fact, Putin’s position is more amenable to America’s strategic requirements than Obama’s, counterintuitive as that might sound.

More broadly, the US should draw a bright line between areas of the world where it has inviolable interests and areas subject to bargaining. It was a supreme act of stupidity to abandon the deployment of anti-missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic as the Obama administration did in September 2009. Russia didn’t like it, but Russia is not supposed to like it. Showing weakness to the Russians merely elicits contempt. The US should make clear that ties of culture and blood link the Poles and Czechs to the American people, and that we will stand behind them no matter what.

Ukraine is a different matter. Russians comprise half the population of Ukraine, and Russia cannot walk away from them, nor from the rest of the 22 million Russians left outside the Federation in the so-called near abroad after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

As I reported in a 2008 essay (Americans Play Monopoly, Russians Chess, Asia Times Online, August 19, 2008), “The desire of a few hundred thousand Abkhazians and South Ossetians to remain in the Russian Federation rather than Georgia may seem trivial, but Moscow is setting a precedent that will apply to tens of millions of prospective citizens of the Federation – most controversially in Ukraine.”

America has no strategic interest in Ukraine. Nine years after the so-called Orange Revolution, the pro-Moscow Party of the Regions remains firmly in charge. The opposition is tainted with an ugly strain of anti-Semitism, as Rachel Ehrenfeld, director of the American Center of Democracy, reported May 30.

The nationalists whom Washington backed in the heady days after the invasion of Iraq are not exactly the good guys. What we have learned from a decade of bumbling is that Russia can have Ukraine if it wants it badly enough, and that we really don’t want it anyway. Except for Hungary, Ukraine has the lowest fertility rate of any country in Europe. Its strategic importance will deteriorate along with its demographics.

The proposals above are stopgap measures to limit damage in a deteriorating situation. If the US really want to get Russia’s attention, it needs to do precisely what Ronald Reagan and his team set out to do in 1981: convince the Russians that America would leapfrog them in military technology. That means aggressive funding of basic research on model of the old DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). If Putin is persuaded that his residual advantage in surface-to-air missile technology has reached its best-used-by-date, he will be far more flexible on a range of negotiating issues.

I am painfully aware that the political environment is not conducive to this approach. That does not change the fact that it is what needs to be done.

David P. Goldman is an associate fellow at the Middle East Forum, and the author ofHow Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying, Too) and the essay collectionIt’s Not the End of the World, It’s Just the End of You .

An Important Step on the Way to the Bomb.

By Dr. Rafael Ofek

11/6/2013

According to a summary of news agency reports from Tehran, a ceremony was conducted on Saturday, June 8, 2013, to dedicate the installation of the heavy water container at reactor IR-40 which Iran has been building over the last decade. The ceremony, attended by the Iranian president Ahmadinejad, was held at the reactor site in Khondab, near Arak, about 250 kilometers south-west of Tehran. Fereidoun Abbasi, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, who accompanied Ahmadinejad, was quoted as saying: “The installation represents a major step in the progress of this project.”

In Iran’s assessments, the following stage of the project, pre-commissioning, involving the use of dummy fuel assemblies and light water, will be carried out during the last quarter of 2013. The commissioning stage – operation using real fuel assemblies and heavy water, will take place during the first quarter of 2014. Regular operation will commence during the last quarter of 2014.

The container is the main component of the reactor. Heavy water is used at the reactor as a moderator and coolant, and the amount required for reactor IR-40 is estimated at 80 to 90 tons. Nuclear combustion takes place inside the nuclear fuel assemblies positioned in the numerous channels inside the container. The nuclear fuel for IR-40, unlike the other Iranian reactors, is natural uranium oxide (unenriched uranium).

Owing to its structure and characteristics, IR-40 is suitable for producing nuclear weapons-grade plutonium. Production capacity is estimated at 8 to 10 kilograms per year – enough to produce two nuclear weapon cores per year. On the other hand, Iran claims that IR-40 will be used to produce radioisotopes for medical purposes, and that it would replace the old research reactor in Tehran, supplied to Iran in 1967 by the US. However, this claim contradicts Iran’s declaration according to which the massive amount of uranium it had enriched to 20% grade is intended for the production of nuclear fuel for the research reactor in Tehran.

In a report issued last May, the IAEA complained that despite its commitment in 2003 and the UN Security Council resolutions notwithstanding, Iran has not yet suspended the heavy water reactor project, as it has not suspended the uranium enrichment project. Moreover, since 2006, Iran has not provided the IAEA with the complete design data of the reactor, as it was required to do according to the IAEA code.

Additionally, Iran continues to prevent the IAEA from supervising the heavy water production plant, also located in Khondab. The capacity of this plant is 16 tons of heavy water per year. The reasoning for this state of affairs is a formal one: in Iran’s opinion, heavy water is not a controlled nuclear substance, as it is not a fissionable material like uranium or plutonium, and is not even radioactive.

The implementation of Iran’s plan to produce military-grade plutonium depends on the activation of a “hot lab” that would separate the plutonium created inside the uranium in the nuclear fuel while the reactor is in operation. The uranium fission process taking place at the reactor involves the production of various radioactive substances and massive radiation. Consequently, massive protection is required in order to handle the used nuclear fuel. Iran faces two options – establish a new “hot lab”, a project that could take a few years, or adapt and equip the existing labs at the nuclear center in Tehran, which, for the time being, are under IAEA supervision. It is difficult to estimate the time required in order to acquire the required equipment, install it and make these labs serviceable. In any case, the implications of operating a “hot lab” to separate plutonium will bring the game Iran plays vis-à-vis IAEA and the international community to an abrupt and final halt.

Anyway, as far as the aspect of miniaturizing the nuclear weapons and fitting them into the warheads of ballistic missiles is concerned, plutonium is superior to enriched uranium, owing to the fact that the amount needed in order to produce a core for a small plutonium bomb is about three times smaller than the one needed to produce a core for an enriched uranium bomb.

Lt. Col. (Res.) Dr. Rafael Ofek is an expert in the physics and technology of nuclear weapons. He had served in the Israeli intelligence community as a senior researcher and analyst.

Barak-8 Missiles to Defend Gas Production Rigs at Sea.

IsraelDefense

According to the updated plans for protecting Israel’s offshore gas rigs, the Israeli Navy will equip the rigs with Barak missiles for defense against Yakhont missiles. The gas rigs are located at a distance of nearly 80 miles from the coasts of Israel, and near the coasts of Lebanon. The plans additionally include the acquisition of four new missile boats, as well as naval observation and collection measures, including UAVs.

The use of the Barak missiles is intended to solve the severe problem troubling the Israeli Navy – the Russian missile Yakhont that Russia sold to Syria and which according to assessments will also be transferred to Hezbollah (if it has not been transferred already).

In the past year, the supply of the missile to Syria has become a done deal. The Yakhont can hit naval vessels at a distance of up to 300 kilometers with considerable precision, and it is equipped with a warhead containing 200 kilograms of explosives. The missile flies towards its target at a speed twice the speed of sound.

The Yakhont’s characteristics make its interception very difficult: at a distance of several kilometers from the attacked target, the “sea-skimming” missile descends to a cruise altitude of roughly ten meters above sea level, making it difficult for radars to detect it. The Yakhont’s homing head is build so that it is very difficult for electro-optic defense systems to get a lock on it while in flight.

The Israeli Navy presently possesses the Barak-1 missile, jointly developed by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and Rafael a decade ago. The intent is to equip the rigs with Barak-8 missiles, which are in advanced development stages at IAI.

The system is intended to protect not only the rig or the vessel carrying the missiles, but also fleets of vessels sailing together in a given expanse. The objective is to supply comprehensive perimeter defense to the entire navy, with command and control (C2) systems receiving data from the radar systems of the different vessels and integrating them to create a shared combat and threat picture.

The Barak-8 system includes an advanced C2 center, developed by IAI’s Mabat Missiles factory. The system integrates mission management towards managing an individual fire system or managing fire from several units in parallel. The Barak-8 has a radar system that presents a 360-degree hemispheric picture, above the vessel or the vessel layout. It has a high resolution and can detect missiles with a very low radar cross section area. The system is also suitable for countering naval “seaskimming” cruise missiles, as well as threats to aircraft or helicopters.

The Barak-8 missile is single-staged: the missile has fixed stabilizers in its lower section and driving surfaces in its bow. The interceptors are stabilized with carrying and launch containers, which are fixed vertically below the deck of the missile boats. Once a target is received, the missile is launched vertically and immediately transitions to horizontal flight in order to hit and destroy the target, while receiving indications and data from the vessel’s guidance system. Once the target is within range of its self-detection systems, it locks on it and destroys it. The interceptor possesses advanced homing capabilities, suitable for intercepting aircraft and missiles flying at a low altitude above the water, in all weather conditions. The Barak missile family also includes an surface-to-air variant for protecting against aircraft. IAI has thus far sold the system to foreign countries (primarily to In

US Embassy warns Americans to stay out of Golan | The Times of Israel.

Email sent to citizens in Israel after heavy fighting between Syrian troops and rebels along border last week

Israelis and tourists look at fire caused by fighting in Syria from an observation point on Mt. Bental in the Golan Heights, near the border between the Golan Heights and Syria, Friday, June 7, 2013. Syrian rebels on Thursday briefly captured a crossing point along a cease-fire line with Israel in the contested Golan Heights. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

The US Embassy in Tel Aviv issued a security warning advising citizens to defer travel to the Golan Heights because of the civil war in Syria.

Dated June 6 but emailed Monday to US citizens in Israel, the advisory was issued due to “fighting between Syrian opposition forces and the Syrian military in the central portion of the Disengagement Zone in the Golan Heights near the Syrian town of Qunaitra.”

“US citizens are advised to defer non-essential travel to and within the Golan Heights and to exercise an extra measure of caution,” it said.

The Golan has been increasingly pulled into the Syrian war, with volleys of fire between Israel and Syria coming somewhat frequently. Last week saw rebels and Syrian troops engaged in some of the heaviest fighting yet along Israel’s border, and rebels at one point took control of the only crossing between the countries.

Austria, the largest contingent of the UN peacekeeping force posted along the border, said Monday it would begin pulling out troops later this week.

After the pullout, the force will be left with 341 Philippine soldiers and 193 from India, a fraction of its former strength.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Golan heating up, but Israel hoping to sit out Syria conflict | The Times of Israel.

Border battles and the crumbling of the UN peacekeeping force bring the civil war closer, though most Israelis would prefer to stay out

An Israeli soldier directs a tank near the Quneitra crossing with Syria on Thursday.(photo credit: AP/Sebastian Scheiner)

ERUSALEM (JTA) — For much of the past two years, Israel has taken a singular approach to the Syrian civil war: Stay as far away as possible.
But with a recent string of victories by forces loyal to President Bashar Assad and the crumbling of the UN peacekeeping force that has kept the peace along the border for four decades, the tack is becoming considerably harder.

Assad’s statement that he had decided to engage in military action against Israel, published Monday in an interview with a Lebanese paper, was followed by a terse warning from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Anyone who threatens to hit or hits Israel will be hit,” Netanyahu said.
The warning follows a tense conflict June 6 on Israel’s border in which Assad’s forces recaptured the lone border crossing after it had briefly fallen into rebel hands. Heavy fighting saw Syrian tanks enter the demilitarized zone between the two countries and prompted Austria to withdraw its 300-soldier contingent from the U.N. force, shrinking it by one-third.

Israel threatened to strike the tanks, according to a leaked UN document, refraining only when Syria promised to fire solely on rebel troops.

“The crumbling of the UN force on the Golan Heights underscores the fact that Israel cannot depend on international forces for its security,” Netanyahu told his weekly Cabinet meeting in Jerusalem on Sunday.
Israel has assiduously sought to stay out of the Syrian morass, engaging only when its interests were directly threatened. Thrice Israel has attacked Syrian weapons convoys bound for Hezbollah — once in January and twice in May.

Before this week, however, Israel had not threatened to engage Syrian forces directly.

Still, Thursday’s battle probably won’t change Israel’s basic approach to the two-year-old conflict next door. The Syrian border has been largely calm since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel won’t enter the war “as long as fire is not being directed at us.”
That attitude plays well with ordinary Israelis, who clearly don’t want their country dragged into a neighboring conflict. An Israel Democracy Institute poll released Sunday showed that 86 percent of Israeli respondents want to stay out of Syria.

“Israel has an interest that the two sides will keep fighting, and not go in and decide who’s better for Israel,” said Syria expert Ely Karmon of the Interdisciplinary Center. “We need to wait and see who will control Syria.”

The question remains far from answered.

Recent Assad victories have raised the prospect that he could survive the war to control a northern enclave where his minority Alawite sect is concentrated. Should he survive, he could continue to funnel arms from Iran to Hezbollah. No one expects Assad will ever fully regain control of the whole country.

Assad’s survival might not be an entirely bad thing, according to Shlomo Brom, a senior research associate at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies.

Even a limited Assad regime, he said, would help prevent Syria from becoming a power vacuum in which jihadists could attack Israel. And it would give Israel “an address on the other side” with which to negotiate.
Assad’s survival also would be a victory for Hezbollah, which openly committed itself last month to fighting for Assad and drove his victory last week in Qusair, a key city between the Lebanese border and the rebel stronghold of Homs.

“It will be a victory for Iran, Hezbollah, the enemies of the West,” said Ephraim Inbar, director of Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center. “He helps Hezbollah to hurt Israel.”

But Hezbollah also could find itself hurt by Assad’s survival. The organization, which has long commanded respect in the region for fighting Israel, may find its reputation damaged by turning its guns against fellow Muslims.

Hezbollah, Brom said, has shown itself as “a foreign body in Lebanon that serves foreign interests.”

Iran eyes 30 nuclear bombs a year, says Israeli minister – Your Middle East.

Iran is working round the clock to enlarge its nuclear infrastructure with the eventual aim of developing an industry capable of building up to 30 bombs a year, an Israeli minister charged on Monday.

Speaking to reporters in Jerusalem, Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz said Tehran was “very close” to crossing the red line laid out by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year.

But he said it was biding its time and building uranium-enrichment facilities before making the final push for weapons-grade material.

“The Iranians are getting very close now to the red line… They have close to 200 kilos — 190 kilos (418 pounds) — of 20 percent enriched uranium,” Steinitz said.

“Once they have 250 kilos, this is enough to make the final rush to 90 percent,” the level of enrichment required for a nuclear warhead, he said in a presentation to the Foreign Press Association.

“It is a matter of weeks or maybe two months to jump from 20 percent to 90 percent with so many centrifuges,” he said.

“What they are doing now — instead of crossing the red line, they are widening and enlarging their capacity by putting in more centrifuges, faster centrifuges.”

Iran’s aim, he charged, was to build a nuclear arsenal, not just a single bomb.

“Many people are saying it’s a question of the Iranian bomb – whether they will have it or not. No. We are speaking about an Iranian arsenal.”

Tehran’s big fear was that a Western military strike could wipe out their nuclear facilities “within a few hours,” he said.

“The Iranians feel very vulnerable, especially from American air operations. This is their main concern — that if the West, if NATO, if America decide to attack them, a few hours of accurate air raids might destroy their nuclear facilities.”

Israel and many Western governments suspect Iran is using its civilian nuclear programme as cover for developing a weapons capability, a charge denied by Tehran.

But the Jewish state, the Middle East’s sole, if undeclared, nuclear power, has refused to rule out a pre-emptive military strike to prevent it.

Steinitz also ruled out any change in policy that might result from the Iranian presidential elections which are to take place on Friday, saying the result was already known.

“Nothing is going to change. There will be, unfortunately, no significant changes because of these so-called elections because (supreme leader Ayatollah Ali) Khamenei has already won,” he said.

“He is the leader and he makes the decisions and he already made his decision to spend many billions of dollars on building this nuclear industry with only one aim,” he charged.

“The decision was already made to get nuclear weapons — you don’t spent so much money and you don’t suffer $70 billion of losses (due to international sanctions) in one year only to show that you can spin some centrifuges,” he concluded.

© AFP 2013

Moscow sets up Russian Golan brigade, warns Israel Sunnis plus al Qaeda are bigger threat than Assad.

( Even if Israel wanted the Russian troops on the Golan under secret understandings, they would act as if they didn’t and would end up accepting them only under pressure.  – JW )

Russian MI-24 helicopters designated for Golan

Moscow is not ready to give up on getting Russian troops posted on the divided Golan as part of the UN force policing the Israeli-Syrian separation sector, even after rejections by the UN and Israel. Monday, June 10, the Russian lawmaker Aleksey Pushkov, an influential foreign relations policy adviser to the Kremlin, said: “The issue has not been yet solved, it is being considered. We must take some real action because we cannot exclude that the Syrian-Israeli topic would be involved in large-scale military action.”

Shortly before he spoke, the military announced in Moscow that the Russian Airborne Troops had formed a separate brigade especially designed to serve as peacekeepers “under the aegis of the United Nations or as part of the force set up by the Russian-led CSTO (Russian-Asian) security bloc for combating

terrorism. Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan contribute special units.

Vladimir Shamanov, commander of Russian Airborne troops, said the new brigade had been awarded the status of “a peacekeeping unit” on June 1.  He did not say by whom. debkafile’s military sources disclose the Moscow proposes to give the “peacekeeping” brigade from the Russian Airborne Troops “teeth” in the form of of MI-24 combat helicopters.

The idea of placing Russian peacekeepers on the Golan was first voiced by President Vladimir Putin on June 7, after Austria decided to withdraw its 377-strong contingent from the area over an outbreak of fighting there between Syrian troops and rebels.

The idea was quickly shot down by the United Nations and Israel on the grounds that the Israeli-Syrian 1974 ceasefire accord barred veto-wielding UN Security Council members from participation in the peacekeeping force.

On June 8, debkafile reported exclusively that  Putin was determined to override Israeli and UN objections and get Russian troops deployed on the Syrian Golan by hook or by crook.

On June 9, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu publicly rejected the Putin offer, saying Israel could not afford to place its security in the hands of international forces.
Speaking at a Moscow press conference on Monday, MP Pushkov went on to say that it was too early to say that Vladimir Putin’s suggestion of placing Russian peacekeepers on the Golan Heights lacked perspectives or could not be implemented.
As though on cue, the Hizballah-controlled Lebanese Al Akhbar Monday quoted President Bashar Assad as warning that, for him, opening a front on the Golan against Israel was “a serious matter” and would not just consist of firing a few improvised rockets from time to time.

This gave Pushkov the opening for his warning to Israel: That Israeli authorities would oppose this step (Putin’s offer) was not surprising, he said, but he warned about possible consequences: “Assad could be replaced by radical Islamists in comparison with whom Assad would seem an angel from heaven,” said the Russian lawmaker.

“The people who are now offering friendship to Israel would not necessarily see Israel as their partner when they come to power, rather they would see it as an enemy,” the Russian MP said, hinting at the references made by Hizballah and Syrian government spokesmen to the relations Israel had purportedly formed with certain Syrian rebel groups. Hizballah broadcasts even depicted outdated Israeli tanks and other equipment, booty captured in its 2006 war with Israel, to prove its point.
Therefore, Pushkov advised Israeli leaders to pay more attention to the possible future scenarios in Syria and take into account that Russia could play a positive and stabilizing role in the region.
debkafile notes that this was the first time any Russian official had mentioned the unmentionable: a possible future turn in the wheel of the Syrian conflict that would oust Assad and bring his foes, the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda, to power in Damascus.