WarSclerotic

Russia’s National Security Adviser Nikolai Patrushev and deputy foreign, justice and public security ministers arrived in Jerusalem Tuesday, Jan. 30, along with senior military and intelligence generals. They came less than 24 hours after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu sat down in the Kremlin with President Vladimir Putin. The Russian visitors are the guests of Israel’s National Security Council chief Meir Ben Shabat. They are to hold talks with their Israeli counterparts on questions relating to Iranian’s military presence in Syria and Lebanon and the amendments Israel seeks for the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran, of which Russia along with the US and four other world powers were signatories.
No announcement was made on the duration of the high-ranking Russian visit.

DEBKAfile’s diplomatic sources note that it is unprecedented for a delegation of such eminence to get organized for a foreign mission in so short a space of time. Putin must have expedited it for three reasons:

1. He told Netanyahu that the Iranian and Syrian issues could not be settled in a single conversation and called for a thorough appraisal. To this end, he was sending a high-profile delegation to Israel for a thorough threshing-out of all their aspects.
2. Putin saw his chance to create daylight between Israel and Washington’s current posture in Syria which is confrontational.
3. Participants in the Jan 29-30 Sochi conference on Syria, which failed, were to be shown that Moscow has multiple options to pursue in Syria.

DEBKAfile reported earlier in this space:

The Trump administration’s abrupt flight from its understandings with Moscow on Syria left Netanyahu with a blank agenda for his Moscow talks with Putin on Monday, Jan 29.
This about-face will be examined, with new revelations, in the coming issue of DEBKA Weeklyout on Friday, Feb. 2
DEBKAfile reports exclusively that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had been well primed for his meeting in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He had come away from last week’s Davos Economic Forum and his talks with President Donald Trump and European leaders with a strong impression of amity between Trump and Putin, endorsed by key European leaders, on two critical issues: that Syria’s political transition from war to peace would lead to Bashar Assad’s ouster along with the eviction of all foreign armies, including those of Iran and Hizballah. This was the essence of the “non-paper’ drawn up by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in conjunction with Russia’s plans for Syria. Moscow planned to put this formula before the Sochi Syrian peace conference on Monday, Jan. 29.

But between the end of the Davos forum on Friday, Jan. 26 and Sunday night, Jan. 28, this deal was blown sky high in Washington, just hours before Netanyahu set out for Moscow. His agenda was to have centered on obtaining a Russian guarantee that the new military and political understanding with the Americans left Israel’s military with freedom of action in the skies of Syria and Lebanon among other topics. But in the light of the turnabout in Washington, he had to rethink his agenda. So, shortly before his plane took off from Tel Aviv, Netanyahu performed a second last-minute switch of accompanying advisers, replacing Military Intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Hertzi Halevi with an officer of lower rank.

The issue of a permanent Iranian military presence in Syria is always on every Israeli agenda. But Netanyahu had already repeatedly made Israel’s position known on this to Putin. He already knew that Israel was determined not let Lebanon be used as an Iranian missile base, and this matter was not in any case at the forefront of Russian strategists’ concerns.

Vladimir Putin has drawn up this plan for the Sochi conference. He will put it before Binyamin Netanyahu when they meet on Monday, Jan. 29.

DEBKAfile reports that the Russian president has prepared a plan for Syria’s post-war future for presentation to the Syrian peace conference which begins on the same day at the Black Sea resort of Sochi. Moscow has taken into account 1,600 Syrian government and opposition participants. Some rebel groups have announced a boycott. DEBKAfile reports that the absentees are pro-Assad and pro-Iranian groups who are boycotting the event to reflect their masters’ objections to the Russian president’s plans. Unless he decides to back down at the last moment, those plans are substantially as follows:

• Early democratic elections to the presidency and parliament, guaranteed by Moscow to be genuinely democratic with all parts of the population allowed for the first time to vote and put up candidates for office.
• The new constitution will reflect the demographic changes overtaking the country in the seven-year war. The largest group, the Sunnis, will win majority representation in parliament, while Bashar Assad’s small Allawite sect will no longer be privileged as a ruling minority. Assad will thus automatically lose his dominant rule on Syria’s political scene.
• A New National Syrian Army is to be established, to replace the government force, which has been heavily depleted in the long war. Since most young Syrians of military age refused to join Assad’s army in the last few years, most military units exist only on paper. Once again, the country’s demographic structure will be represented at all ranks of the new army. Moscow is committed to funding the new army and furnishing it with modern weapons, as well as restructuring the units, a process already in hand.

In all these proposals, the Russians conferred intensively with Riyadh and Cairo – the former as a key Arab supporter of the Syrian anti-Assad opposition and the latter as a steadfast backer of President Assad. This stratagem gave Moscow the broadest possible inter-Arab approval for his plan and moreover, as DEBKAfile reports, an indirect line to Washington. Saudi and Egyptian leaders, upon receipt of the Russian plan, showed it to the Trump administration, collected its responses and passed them back to Moscow.

Only on one point did the Saudis lean hard on the Russians to alter their first blueprint. They maintained that as it stood, the regions to be allotted to the various armies for control were not clearly laid out. Moscow replied that the New Syrian Army would be taking over. But Riyadh insisted on an explicit provision mandating the expulsion of all armed foreign forces from Syria. Last week, Moscow agreed to this amendment and sent a message to Tehran that Sochi conference resolutions would include a ban on any foreign military presence in Syria. In a word, Putin had agreed to show the door to Iranian forces and all imported Shiite militias operating there under Iranian command, including Hizballah.

This was the nub of the information that Putin proposes to relay to the Israeli prime minister when they meet in Moscow on Monday, the same day as the Sochi conference. Netanyahu will also ask his host to make this measure ironclad so that Tehran and Hizballah will never find a loophole for their return to Syria. If Putin succeeds in getting part of his Syrian peace plan accepted at the Sochi conference, he will have brought off a major feat.