With the position of the Syrian forces besieged in the desert town of Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria remaining extremely precarious – latest reports suggest they were forced to surrender hard-won gains they made there against ISIS yesterday – the Russians have brought the full weight of their air force to bear, striking at ISIS positions near Deir Ezzor with 6 TU22M3 bombers.
Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov has today confirmed that the Russians have extended an invitation to the US to join the Syrian peace talks in Astana, which is due to start on Monday.
It is not yet certain that US President Trump – due to be inaugurated tomorrow – will accept this offer, but the likelihood is that he will.
With Palmyra still under ISIS control, and with ISIS threatening to capture Deir Ezzor, the Russian military has once against blamed the military crisis in eastern Syria on the US.
The Russian military first did so in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Palmyra in December when it complained – rightly – that the reason ISIS was able to send troops to Palmyra from Mosul and Raqqa was because ISIS is under no real pressure there.
Following weeks of reports that the Russian air force was quietly providing air support to the Turkish army fighting ISIS in the strategic Syrian town of Al-Bab, confirmation has now finally come from Russia that this is indeed happening.
Indeed the Russians have confirmed that the Russian and Turkish air forces for the first time engaged in a joint air strike.
One of the major complaints I have made concerning the reporting of the fighting in Aleppo is that no Western journalists were there, and that they were reporting uncritically information obtained at second and third hand from Jihadi sources opposed to the Syrian government.
Patrick Cockburn, the Middle East correspondent of the Independent and a vastly better informed journalist about the conflicts in the Middle East than almost anyone else who writes in the West about the conflicts, has made the same point.
Russian President Putin and Turkish Erdogan had a further telephone conversation today, in what has now become a regular series of such calls.
Reports from Syria suggest that the battle for Wadi Barada, and the water crisis in Damascus it is causing, may be coming to an end.
It seems that following Syrian army advances, and after negotiations brokered by a team of Russian officers, several Jihadi groups in Wadi Barada have agreed to lay down their arms.
Following the Syrian army’s victory in Aleppo the Russian Defence Ministry has confirmed that the Russian fleet sent to the eastern Mediterranean earlier in the autumn, including the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov and the nuclear powered missile battlecruiser Pyotr Veliky, are being withdrawn to Russia.
This was always the plan. There was never any suggestion that the deployment was intended to be anything other than a temporary one.
Russia’s Defence Ministry has released more film of its aircraft the Admiral Kuznetsov engaging in combat operations in the eastern Mediterranean.
The film shows SU33 and MiG29 fighters taking off and landing on the deck of the Admiral Kuznetsov before and after carrying out air patrols over Syria.
The Russian Defence Ministry claims that the SU33s and MiG29s have carried out air strikes in Syria using 500 kg bombs. However all the aircraft shown in the film actually carry air to air missiles, which appears to confirm that their primary role is air defence.
