Week Seventeen of the Russian Intervention in Syria: does Erdogan want war with Russia?

February 7th, 2016

Awake Goy

Week Seventeen of the Russian Intervention in Syria: does Erdogan want war with Russia?

The situation with Turkey is rapidly getting out of control: not only have the Turks conducted artillery strikes across the Syrian border, Turkey has refused to comply with its obligations under the Open Skies Treaty and refused to let a Russian surveillance aircraft overfly Turkey. The Russian military has now declared that it had detected signs of Turkish preparations for an invasion.

If we are talking about the typical Turkish violation of a national border to attack the Kurds, like what they did many times in the past already, and if that intervention is limited in depth, Russia will probably chose non-military means to put pressure on Turkey. Again, while the crazies in Turkey badly want a war with Russia to internationalize the conflict and force NATO to intervene, the Russians have no interest at all in such an escalation. Just as in the Donbass, the West is trying to bait Russia into a war and Russia is refusing to take that bait. The problem is that unlike the Ukronazis, the Turks have a much more powerful military machine which the Russian cannot ignore like they have ignored the Ukronazi military and various death squads. So if Erdogan’s goal is just to look macho and flex some muscle, say like what Reagan did in Grenada, then he can probably get away with it, at least for a short operation. But if Erdogan is dead set in having a conflict with Russia, the Russian won’t be able to just hunker down and wait for him to calm down.

For this reason, the Russians, far from being trigger happy, will undertake every imaginable effort to show that they did not initiate the war, even if that means letting Turkey enter into Syria, at least as long as the Turks stay close to their border and do not attempt to change the course of the war. If all the Turks want is a thin “security zone” inside Syria, I don’t see the Russians using military force to deny this to them. They will protest, vehemently, on a diplomatic level, and they will help the Syrians and Kurds, but they will not directly attack the Turkish forces.