Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

The Putin-Erdogan Deal Poses a Challenge to the West

The Kremlin offers authoritarians a brokerage service based on cynical principles of mutual gain rather than values and allegiances.

October 23, 2019 at 12:18 PM UTC

By Leonid Bershidsky

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Russia in, America out.
Photographer: Sergei Chirikov/AP

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Vladimir Putin is in the brokerage business. The deal on northern Syria that Russian President Vladimir Putin hammered out with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday serves as a perfect advertisement for the service Putin is offering authoritarians around the world, but primarily in the Middle East and Africa.

Ever since Putin intervened on President Bashar Al-Assad’s side in 2015, he has used the Syrian conflict as the shop window for the new international role he sees for Russia. Based on Russia’s behavior in Syria, a situation that defies the very idea of long-term alliances and adversarial relationships, these principles are: