MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is scheduled to address the United Nations General Assembly on Monday for the first time in a decade. Neil MacFarquhar, the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times, looks at what Mr. Putin has been up to recently. Where is President Putin’s focus? In the weeks leading up to the United Nations gathering, Mr. Putin caught the world by surprise by ordering an escalation of Russian military aid to Syria.
Mr. Putin announced that the delivery of major weapons — including warplanes, helicopter gunships and armored vehicles to the Syrian military, along with more Russian forces — was the first step toward forging a grand international coalition to confront the Islamic State.
The basic idea is that the international community should provide the support necessary for ground troops deployed by President Bashar al-Assad and other regional players. Western and other regional governments have emphasized that they want to see Mr. Assad gone.
What can the General Assembly expect from Mr. Putin?
In what may well be the most intensely watched moment of the General Assembly, the Russian president is supposed to use his appearance, his first there in 10 years, to flesh out his proposal. There is a chance he will outline a specific military strategy, but many analysts expect him to stick to more general themes — like how a single world power has made the world inherently more unstable. Exhibit A: The Middle East. What are his goals?
There are several reasons Mr. Putin is focused on Syria, both domestically and internationally. At home, Mr. Putin wants to move public attention away from the stalled war in Ukraine as well as mounting economic problems, and above all to present Russia under his watch as returning to its global power status.
On the international front, Russia wants to shore up the beleaguered Assad government, Russia’s main Arab ally. More widely, Mr. Putin seeks to break out of the diplomatic and economic isolation that Washington and other Western governments imposed after Russia annexed Crimea and destabilized Ukraine. (Countries like China and India have continued to interact frequently with the Russian leader.)
In that sense, Mr. Putin has already successfully leveraged his military aid to Syria into a meeting with a reluctant President Obama on Monday. The Russian leader will be in New York only briefly — he is not scheduled to spend the night.
The world is witnessing a rising power that may eliminate ISIS. ISIS is a creation of the USA; it is probable that the USA did not intentionally create ISIS but the USA created this monstrousity none-the-less. Putin may be able to fix the situation with multi-lateral cooperation from the ME.
