Putin's Holy War

It would be wrong to portray Vladimir Putin's reassertion of Russia's great power status in the Middle East as raw self-interest. There is more at stake. The Russian president's invocation of God in the stinging final sentence of his New York Times op-ed of September 11 should dispense with any speculation that it was the work of his slick PR team at Ketchum. "When we ask for the Lord's blessings," Putin preached to President Obama, "we must not forget that God created us equal." For the Kremlin, Syria is as much a question of religion as of arms sales, access to the warm-water port at Tartus, or the worth of a veto on the UN Security Council. As Alicja Curanovic explains in The Religious Factor in Russia's Foreign Policy (Routledge, 2012), "The Kremlin ever more successfully conducts ‘religious diplomacy', which is an element in building Russia's ‘soft power'."