Russia Helping to keep Assad in power/Russian submarine with 20 ICBMs and 200 nuclear warheads is sailing to Syria/Russia: We never concealed giving arms to Syria

Russia: We never ‘concealed’ giving arms to Syria
By Reuters | Moscow/Monday, 7 September 2015/Russia says it has never concealed the fact that it supplied military equipment to Syria aimed at ‘fighting terrorism,’ RIA Novosti news agency cited a foreign ministry spokeswoman as saying on Monday. The agency, citing the ministry’s spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, also reported that Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in a phone conversation it is “premature” to speak about Russia’s participation in military operations in Syria. A Syrian military official told Reuters there has recently been a “big shift” in Russian military support, including new weapons and training. “Our ties are always developing but in these days a qualitative shift has happened. We call it a qualitative shift in Arabic, which means big,” the Syrian official said.
U.S. concerns over Russian moves
Russia’s Lavrov in recent days reiterated the Russian view that Assad is a legitimate leader, slammed the U.S. position to the contrary as “counterproductive”, and likened the west’s approach to Syria to its failures in Iraq and Libya. A steady flow of Iranian officials to Damascus has also underlined Tehran’s support for an ally who has safeguarded its interests in the Levant in alliance with Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed group fighting alongside Assad in Syria. Earlier on Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry expressed American concerns over reports of Russia’s enhanced military build-up in Syria in a telephone call over the weekend with Lavrov. “The secretary made clear that if such reports were accurate, these actions could further escalate the conflict, lead to greater loss of innocent life, increase refugee flows and risk confrontation with the anti-ISIL coalition operating in Syria,” the department said, using a different acronym for ISIS.

Analysis: Russia taking advantage of West’s inaction to keep Assad in power 
ARIEL BEN SOLOMON /J.Post/09/07/2015

Russia’s recent military buildup in Syria has sparked concern in Western capitals as Vladimir Putin again appears to be shrewdly calculating that the West will not significantly counter his moves.The Russian president’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region last year was not strongly resisted by the Europeans or Americans, and the Kremlin likely expects even less resistance to its involvement a half-world away.Russia’s efforts to maintain its Syrian ally and build inroads with Egypt and elsewhere represent its contest with the US for power and influence in the region. US Secretary of State John Kerry told his Russian counterpart on Saturday the United States was deeply concerned about reports that Moscow was moving toward a major military build-up in Syria widely seen as aimed at bolstering President Bashar Assad.
US authorities have detected “worrisome preparatory steps,” including the transport of prefabricated housing units for hundreds of people to a Syrian airfield, which could signal that Russia is readying deployment of heavy military assets there, a senior US official told Reuters.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Moscow’s exact intentions remained unclear but that Kerry called Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to leave no doubt of the US position.

The State Department pointed to media accounts suggesting an “imminent enhanced Russian military build-up” in Syria.
However, experts told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday that it is highly unlikely that Moscow will insert its army into Syria to fight for Assad’s regime. Nikolay Kozhanov, a non-resident fellow at Carnegie Moscow Center and a visiting fellow at Chatham House London, told the Post on Sunday that recent media speculation that Russia could get more deeply involved in Syria and even fight for Assad’s regime are exaggerated.
However, he said, his talks with people in Russia and Syria reveal that Moscow “has definitely raised the quality of equipment it is sending,” adding that Russia is “raising the stakes.”

More advanced equipment, such as armored trucks and civilian drones are being sent, but Russian society and its military “have no intention to send people on the ground,” said Kozhanov. The experience fighting radical Islamic groups in the southern Russian region of Chechnya adds to the sentiment in Russia. What they are doing is increasing the quality of equipment and adding the advisers necessary to train Syrian forces to use it. Kozhanov suggested that it is possible that Russian aviation and special forces are active in Syria in a supporting role.

Asked if he sees a change in Russia’s Syria policy, Kozhanov replied that he does not see so much change, as more continuity in its Syria policy, which is meant to keep the regime’s stronghold in the Mediterranean coastal province of Latakia from collapsing. Middle East Quarterly editor Prof. Efraim Karsh, a Middle East scholar at King’s College in London and Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies told the Post, “Russia has historically been extremely careful in committing ‘boots on the ground’ in Third World conflicts – as opposed to arms shipment and advisory support.” Russia has done so only when seeing no other choice, he said. “Hence I seriously doubt whether Russian troops will be fighting in Syria,” he added. Yet, he continued, Putin tends to use whatever means he has to undermine Western anti-Russian measures, as he did in the Ukrainian crisis.

“And what can be better than this, having the Europeans tear each other apart over the escalating refugee crisis and forgetting all about the Ukraine.”Ariel Cohen, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and director of the Center for Energy, Natural Resources and Geopolitics at the Institute for Analysis of Global Security in Washington, told the Post that Russia has ambitions to be an equal partner with the US in Syria and the Middle East. “To accomplish that, it is projecting power into Syria to protect Assad and fight ISIS, so that it becomes an ‘indispensable party’ to the final settlement. However, this is risky, as Russian and American fighter jets may clash in the skies over Syria,” he said. “Unfortunately for Russia, it does not recognize that Syria is dead as a nation-state. It is a geopolitical corpse,” asserted Cohen, adding that not even Russia and Iran can maintain Assad’s control over all of Syrian territory. The capture of the Crimea in Ukraine was the first step, he continued, and the projection of naval power into the Mediterranean via Syria was the second, and now it is trying to secure naval bases in the Red Sea, Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf.

“While Europe is swamped with throngs of migrants, Russia is trying to build up a distant perimeter of defenses in the Middle East to prevent Islamic State from engaging it in the North Caucasus, including Chechnya and Dagestan.”“This is 19th and 20th century thinking for the great geopolitical upheaval of the 21st century,” said Cohen. Reuters contributed to this report.

Russian submarine with 20 ICBMs and 200 nuclear warheads is sailing to Syria
DEBKAfile Exclusive Report September 7, 2015

The world’s largest submarine, the Dmitri Donskoy (TK-208), Nato-coded Typhoon, has set sail for the Mediterranean and is destined for the Syrian coast, debkafile reports exclusively from its military and intelligence sources. Aboard the sub are 20 Bulava (NATO-code SS-N-30) intercontinental ballistic missiles with an estimated up to 200 nuclear warheads. Each missile, with a reported range of 10,000km, carries 6-10 MIRV nuclear warheads. The Russian sub set sail from its North Sea base on Sept. 4, escorted by two anti-sub warfare ships. Their arrival at destination in 10 days time will top up the new Russian military deployment in Syria. President Vladimir Putin’s introduction of a nuclear force opposite Syrian shores builds up what first looked like an operation to fortify Assad’s regime in Damascus into a military expedition capable of an air and sea confrontation with US forces in the Middle East. US Secretary of State John Kerry suggested as much Saturday, Sept. 5, when he expressed concern over reports of Russia’s “increasing military build-up in Syria” in a phone call to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The State Department reported: “The Secretary made clear that if such reports were accurate, these actions could further escalate the conflict, lead to greater loss of innocent life, increase refugee flows and risk confrontation with the anti-ISIL coalition operation in Syria.”Kerry was referring to potential Russian interference with US-led coalition air strikes against the Islamic State in Syria. debkafile’s sources in Washington and Moscow report that the dispatch of a nuclear sub to Syrian waters is taken as a strong message that the Kremlin will not let the US impede its military intervention in the Syrian conflict and will go to extreme lengths to keep the way open for the flow of Russian troops to the war-torn country.
This situation has gone a long way beyond Obama administration intentions when US-Russian talks were initially held for US forces posted in Turkey and Iraq, together with the Russian troops arriving in Syria, to launch a combined effort against the Islamic State. Those talks came to naught. In its coming issue out Friday, Sept. 11, DEBKA Weekly 678 will reveal for the first time how Putin intends to array the Russian forces he is consigning to Syria, their operational planning, their military coordination with Iran and, above all, how the new Russian intervention in Syria may impact US Middle East policy and Israel.