Putin's Ukraine playbook is familiar he used it in Syria

• Putin perfected his Ukraine playbook during his years-long bombardment of Syrian civilians.
• It includes bombing hospitals, a disinformation campaign, and exploiting fear of a deadlier outcome.

Over a few weeks in the fall of 2016, Russia and its allies bombed Al-Sakhour Hospital in Aleppo, Syria at least four times. After an international outcry, a Russian general held a press conference to insist that photos, videos, and eyewitness statements documenting air strikes by the Russian military were "plain forgeries." He provided his own satellite photos of the area, which he offered as proof that the destroyed hospital was in fact relatively unscathed.

The world is now watching a similar strategy play out in Ukraine.

On March 9, Russian warplanes bombed a maternity hospital in Mariupol, a port city in southern Ukraine that has been besieged by Russian forces for more than two weeks. The airstrike initially killed at least three people, and injured 17 patients and staff. A pregnant woman who was carried out of the hospital on a stretcher, in a scene of post-apocalyptic devastation captured by an Associated Press photographer that went viral, died a few days later, along with her child. The Russian defense ministry denied bombing the hospital, and accused Ukraine of staging the attack to garner international sympathy.

This is the playbook that Russia has used since sending troops to Syria in the fall of 2015 to prop up the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad:

* Bombing hospitals and other civilian infrastructure as a form of collective punishment — and then claiming these were "false flag" operations orchestrated by the other side.

* Launching a disinformation campaign to spread confusion and undermine independent reporting and first-hand accounts.

* Claiming that Western powers getting in your way could lead to a far deadlier outcome — like the spread of ISIS, in Syria, or the threat of a European-wide (possibly nuclear) war in the case of Ukraine.

Now, we're seeing President Vladimir Putin deploy these tactics again in Ukraine, although this time he's been met with greater resistance, and skepticism. Unlike Syria, Russia's military onslaught in Ukraine has outraged much of the world and led the European Union and the United States to impose severe sanctions on Russia within days of the invasion.

Putin also underestimated Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who has effectively used digital tools to win the information war and plead for international support and weapons. Zelensky, a former TV star turned president, is seemingly everywhere in his green t-shirt and half-zipped fleece: imploring Congress for more advanced weapons over Zoom; shooting selfie videos on the streets of Kyiv; and even taunting Putin into meeting face-to-face.

"Sit down with me to negotiate, just not at 30 meters," Zelensky said on March 3, taking a jab at Putin's tendency to meet with foreign leaders at the end of an extremely long table. "I don't bite. What are you afraid of?"

Zelensky is creating a new political style, as an everyday hero standing up to a far more powerful bully. That David-versus-Goliath narrative resonates in the West. But in Syria, Putin and Assad did not have to deal with anyone like Zelensky, who could galvanize international support.

Civilian misery as a tactic of war

Popular protests that swept the Arab world in late 2010, and became known as the "Arab Spring," reached Syria in March 2011. Assad, a London-educated ophthalmologist who inherited power from his father, watched the initial response to protests in Tunisia and Egypt, and concluded that those countries' rulers appeared weak by not cracking down forcefully. When his own people revolted, Assad decided to crush the uprising. At first, he relied on his own military and security forces, and the support of two longtime allies: Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

But Assad kept losing ground to rebels and the Syrian conflict soon turned into a proxy war that involved regional and world powers, including Russia and Iran — which supported Assad — and the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, which sent weapons and money to rebel groups trying to topple Assad's regime. (By 2015, the CIA was funneling up to $1 billion a year in anti-tank missiles, light arms, and other weapons to Syrian rebel groups.)

In September 2015, Putin deployed the Russian air force and special forces troops to help Assad, who had lost control of major parts of Syria. Putin's military used overwhelming air power and artillery: it assaulted densely populated areas and destroyed infrastructure to make life as miserable as possible for civilians.

Russian warplanes bombed hospitals, schools, electrical and water plants, and bakeries where civilians were lined up to get bread. The Syrian Network for Human Rights found that more than 170 bakeries were bombed during 10 years of war — the vast majority by Syrian and Russian forces trying to create a food crisis as they recaptured rebel-held areas.

The Russian military also helped Syrian troops lay siege to urban populations, blocking access to food and medicine. The brutal sieges of Aleppo, Syria's largest city, and suburbs of the capital, Damascus, combined with punishing air raids and artillery bombardment, forced tens of thousands of people to surrender and leave their homes.

In December 2016, with intensive Russian air strikes and Iranian ground support, Assad recaptured the rebel-held sections of Aleppo. It marked a turning point for his regime's survival. Human rights groups documented the Russian-Syrian assault on Aleppo and concluded that it amounted to war crimes. "Airstrikes often appeared to be recklessly indiscriminate, deliberately targeted at least one medical facility, and included the use of indiscriminate weapons such as cluster munitions and incendiary weapons," Human Rights Watch concluded after Assad regained full control of Aleppo.

Those reports eerily echo the Russian military's current tactics in Ukraine. Human rights groups, Western leaders and United Nations officials all say that Russia has committed war crimes by bombing hospitals, schools, nurseries, bread lines, and residential buildings in multiple Ukrainian cities. There's growing evidence that Russia is targeting civilians who are trying to escape, using cluster bombs and thermobaric rockets, which suck up oxygen to create massive explosions. President Joe Biden called Putin a "war criminal" on March 16, the day that Zelensky spoke to Congress, after top US officials avoided using the term for weeks.

In Syria, the Assad regime and Russian forces especially targeted hospitals as a way to pressure rebels and drive civilians out of population centers. Physicians for Human Rights, an independent monitoring group, has documented more than 600 attacks on at least 350 separate health facilities from March 2011 through February 2022. (The attacks led to the killing of 942 medical workers.) The group found that 90 percent of these attacks were committed by the Syrian regime and its allies—and that the highest number of attacks took place in 2015 and 2016, at the height of Russia's intervention. Intentionally bombing hospitals is a war crime under international law.

In 2019, there was another spate of attacks on hospitals in the rebel-held Idlib Province, one of the last territories that is not under the Syrian regime's control. A New York Times investigation found that the Russian air force had bombed four hospitals during a 12-hour period in May 2019. It later turned out that Russian and Syrian forces were bombing hospitals and clinics that had shared their GPS coordinates through a UN list meant to prevent such attacks.

The attacks on hospitals have been so brazen that Syrian activists are now warning Ukrainians not to share GPS locations of medical facilities with the UN. "In Syria the Russians used that information to target hospitals," Raed Al Saleh, head of the White Helmets, a Syrian volunteer civil defense group, wrote in a message this week to mark the 11th anniversary of the Syrian uprising. "Ukrainians should also establish small medical and civil defense outposts in secret locations around the city to take the pressure off larger hospitals and mitigate the risk of targeting first responders."

Your lying eyes

All the while, Russia also used disinformation campaigns, especially on social media, to claim that its targeting of Syria's hospitals, bakeries and residential buildings were fabrications — waving away evidence that Syria and Russian troops carried out the vast majority of these attacks on civilian infrastructure.

The White Helmets, which rescued thousands of civilians from the aftermath of Russian and Syrian air strikes in opposition-held territory, were victims of one of the most pernicious disinformation campaigns organized by Russia during the Syrian war. The campaign portrayed the group, which received Western funding, as terrorists linked to Al Qaeda or part of a CIA conspiracy. In 2018, Bellingcat, a British-based research group, documented more than 20 bogus accusations that the White Helmets had been involved in chemical attacks on Syrian soil.

Russia's sophisticated disinformation campaigns in Syria often warned of "false flag" chemical attacks by rebels that would provoke the West to confront the Assad regime. These campaigns served two purposes, which are being repeated in Ukraine: to muddy the waters of which side is responsible for war crimes and to sow doubt in worldwide public opinion. (Russia also managed to cast doubt on the Syrian regime's repeated use of chemical weapons and barrel bombs against civilians.)

So far, Russia is having less success in its disinformation warfare in Ukraine, but that could change as the war grinds on. When Putin first announced his invasion on February 24, he invoked World War II and claimed he would "denazify" Ukraine. Putin tried to conflate Ukrainian nationalism with fascism, and to connect Zelensky's government with extremist and neo-Nazi groups. But the strategy quickly backfired as many in the West dismissed the comparison and historians signed a letter denouncing Russia's "cynical abuse of the term genocide, the memory of World War II and the Holocaust, and the equation of the Ukrainian state with the Nazi regime to justify its unprovoked aggression." Many have also pointed out that Zelensky is Jewish and lost several relatives in the Holocaust.

Things could get worse

Putin's clumsy attempt to portray his invasion of Ukraine as a campaign to fight extremism also has its roots in the Syria war. There, Putin played off the West's fears of terrorism and a flood of refugees from a predominately Muslim country.

For the most part, Western powers stood by as the carnage in Syria unfolded. Europe and the United States were mainly worried about the rise of ISIS, which had swept through Syria and Iraq in 2014. Putin and Assad convinced the West that they would help contain the militants and keep them from reaching the heart of Europe. The two strongmen succeeded in portraying themselves as the lesser evil — compared to ISIS and other jihadists affiliated with Al-Qaeda — even as the Syrian and Russian militaries were causing more death and destruction than the militants. By the time Donald Trump took office in January 2017, Washington shifted its focus to fighting ISIS rather than ousting the Syrian regime. Russia and its allies, meanwhile, were mainly targeting rebel factions opposed to Assad, rather than trying to defeat ISIS.

In Syria, and now in Ukraine, Putin seems to have calculated that the West would protest, but it would not respond to his military intervention with force. In Ukraine, he has constantly reminded the United States and Europe that intervention carries the risk of instigating a third World War or a nuclear crisis. Days after his troops began marching into Ukraine, Putin declared he had put Russia's nuclear arsenal into "special combat readiness," evoking memories of the Cold War. Biden decided not to match the move.

Eight years into Russia's intervention in Syria, Putin has emerged emboldened. He figured he could attack, besiege, and starve civilians — and lie about it with impunity, while convincing Western adversaries that a worse scenario was being averted. That strategy has worked for him in Syria. And he's already using the old playbook in Ukraine on an even larger scale.

Mohamad Bazzi (@BazziNYU) is a journalism professor and director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University. He is a non-resident fellow at Democracy for the Arab World Now, and the former Middle East bureau chief at Newsday.