After rescuing Bashar al-Assad from the brink of battlefield defeat, Vladimir Putin is now suggesting that Russia and the US agree on a general approach to ending the bloodshed in Syria. Only problem is, they don’t. Not by a long shot.

If something sounds too good to be true, chances are it is, goes the axiom.
Vladimir Putin seemed to acknowledge as much when he told reporters at his annual news conference this week that Russia’s approach to settling the Syrian crisis, “strange as it may seem, coincides with the US vision.”
This approach, he went on to explain, involves “joint work on a constitution, creation of instruments of control over future early elections, holding the vote and recognising its results on the basis of that political process.”
Yet Putin was bang on target in characterising the supposed meeting of East-West minds as something seemingly “strange”.
That’s because whatever the emerging consensus between Moscow and Washington on Syria, it has come about largely as the result of a now-familiar pattern (previously seen in Crimea, and then in eastern Ukraine) of the Kremlin unilaterally creating a reality on the ground -- and then foisting that reality on the rest of an unsuspecting world as a diplomatic ‘done deal’.
If you blink, you’ve missed Moscow's military legerdemain.
In fact, much of the Western media had been reporting, in an eyes-wide-open way, on Russia’s military build-up in Syria weeks before Moscow formally announced its go-it-alone airstrikes over Syria on September 30. They saw it coming.
Night-and-day perspectives
It was a slow-motion segue to a dramatically altered reality. One that has left two c... Go on reading on our web site.
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