I'm John Bashar. This is CBSI in the world. Anna Borschewskaia is the author of the new

book, Putin's War in Syria, Russian Foreign Policy, and the price of America's absence.

Russia is now engaged in, after 2013, the fall of 2013, in Syria. However, Anna presents

the three ways of Russian engagement that are quite distinct from how the Soviet Union

handled Afghanistan, even how Yeltsin's government handled the first and second

Chetchen Wars. The three phases will do as best we can, given Anna's deep reporting

here, military, domestic, and diplomatic. Military, and right away you make the point

that the Kremlin's commitment in Syria is to keep Assad in power. Everything is focused

on that. Everything domestic reporting, everything diplomatic conversation to keep him in power.

What did Mr. Putin and his counselors take from Afghanistan and Chetchen, that they immediately

apply to their Syrian intervention? The first lesson of Afghanistan is that the Soviet

Union relied largely on ground troops. It was a major, major conventional troop presence.

If you look at how Russia handled itself in Syria, they couldn't get away with zero boots

on the ground, but really this was a primarily aerial campaign with the naval camp component.

This put Russian officers at much lower risk in terms of getting hurt or killed. These

were also especially elite forces, rather than simply conscripts. In other words, special

forces had gone into Syria, rather than conscripts that had no choice, but do go into Afghanistan

with no training or frankly desire to be there. Another is an invitation from Assad. The

Soviet Union, the fact of the matter is, look, they had engineered an invasion they had for

years tried to conjure up a piece of paper that said that they were invited into Afghanistan,

but the fact of the matter is in Syria, they really did have an invitation to point to this,

was not this was not made up. So this was a much more surgically well crafted intervention,

...