Syria suffered its second S-200 debacle after a stray missile landed in Cyprus less than a year since a previous one accidentally hit a Russian spy plane last September, with these two incidents showing just how desperate it is to respond to “Israel’s” increasingly intense strikes against Iranian forces in the country that it’s forced to depend on such an outdated and unreliable technology after Russia still refuses to allow it to have full and independent operational control over the S-300s.
“Israel’s” anti-Iranian strikes in Syria that it carried out around midnight on 1 July were particularly devastating and destroyed a wide range of targets from Homs to Damascus, but the operation was also marked by an embarrassing debacle after one of the S-200 anti-air missiles that the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) fired in self-defense went astray and ended up landing in Cyprus. This was the second accident in less than a year since a previous missile mistakenly hit a Russian spy plane last September, with these two events showing just how desperate Syria is to respond to “Israel’s” increasingly intense attacks that it’s forced to depend on such an outdated and unreliable technology all because Russia still refuses to allow it to have full and independent operational control over the S-300s.
The world was led to believe through a carefully crafted perception management campaign that the deployment of those units would deter future “Israeli” airstrikes but the reality is that they were never meant to be anything other than “status symbols” to fulfill the wishful thinking fantasies of the members of the Alt-Media Community who are afflicted with a savior complex and ridiculously expect Russia to ride to Syria’s rescue. Moscow’s military mandate strictly concerns anti-terrorist responsibilities, not anything to do with defending the country’s borders from conventional threats, let alone from “Putinyahu’s Rusrael“, but the fake news notion that there’s more to its intervention than just that has given rise to the most absurd theories about Putin’s motivation for getting involved in that conflict.
The most popular narrative is that Russia is an “anti-Zionist crusader state” that’s supposedly dedicated itself to destroying “Israel“, which is easily debunked by simply reading the many positive statements of support that Putin made about the self-professed “Jewish State” that are available on the official Kremlin website. Even so, there are many who can’t accept them as truth and remain convinced that Russia is simply waiting for “the perfect time” to let Syria use the S-300s despite the Arab Republic already suffering so much as part of this so-called “master plan” by not being able to do so. That train of thought is easily discredited after Syria was forced to depend on the outdated and unreliable S-200s to defend itself, something that it wouldn’t risk doing if it was allowed to use that system’s successor.
The run-up to the nighttime attack saw a flurry of false allegations that Russia was supposedly jamming GPS signals in “Israeli” airspace, something that Moscow immediately decried as fake news but which nevertheless fed into the Alt-Media Community’s wishful thinking fantasies that Russia was secretly subverting the self-professed “Jewish State” on behalf of its Syrian “ally”. It can now be asserted without any doubt that those claims were patently false because “Israel” was able to successfully carry out its widespread bombing campaign without any difficulties, but they were probably made in the first place in order to further distance Russia from the deal that it likely struck with “Israel” and the US during last week’s National Security Advisor Summit in Jerusalem to let the “Israeli Air Force” intensify its anti-Iranian strikes in Syria.
Understood in this way, “Israeli” officials therefore lied about the GPS jamming scandal in order to provide soft power cover for their entity’s new Russian ally, the same as RT initially ran a story suggesting that the stray S-200 missile that landed in Cyprus might have actually been a downed “Israeli” jet. Russia and “Israel” sometimes work together to sow the seeds of doubt about their alliance to the international audience such as in this instance, attempting to make it seem to the casual observer that there are serious differences between the two when in reality they’re mostly on the same page about everything in the region, especially the need to “encourage” Assad to request Iran’s dignified but “phased withdrawal” from Syria.
Although Damascus is under heavy Russian influence nowadays that’s only expected to grow in the coming years as Moscow’s concerted efforts to “reform” its “deep state” begin to bear fruit, it would be inaccurate to describe Syria as a “puppet state” at this point since its desperate use of the outdated S-200s in self-defense proves that “Putinyahu’s Rusrael” doesn’t have complete control over the country just yet. President Assad has thus far refused to request Iran’s withdrawal from the country, and elements of the SAA are still doing all they can to respond to “Israeli” aggression, even if it means lobbing unreliable and dangerous S-200s at its incoming missiles and aircraft. Seeing as how “Israel” will probably continue striking Syria all summer as part of Netanyahu’s re-election campaign, the region might see more such S-200 debacles in the coming months.
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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
