Julia Ioffe cautions against dismissing the Russians out of hand:
If Russia cautions against arming rebels that are increasingly dominated by extremists, there’s a sort of knee-jerk reaction in certain quarters of Washington: those fucking Russians. And, yes, that’s fair. Those fucking Russians are part of the reason the conflict has gotten so bad to begin with, and why the forces fighting Assad have become increasingly radicalized: Had the Russians not defended Assad so staunchly back when it was just peaceful protests in Damascus, maybe Syria would have 93,000 more people walking undemolished streets today.
But by dismissing Russian concerns out of hand, we risk doing what the Russians do—if the Americans are for it, we must be against it—and turning the whole thing into a kind of Cold War mobius strip. … We also risk overlooking the merits of their arguments, however much they’re buried in their own Cold War shadowboxing mumbo jumbo. They have been right before, you know. Like, on Iraq.
The Dish 