The story is depressingly familiar.

On Friday, the cease-fire in Syria, which was brokered by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, collapsed as Russian and Syrian warplanes resumed their scorched earth airstrike campaign in Aleppo.

“Russia has no vested interest in stability in the Middle East,” Stephen Blank, senior fellow for Russia at the American Foreign Policy Council, told The Daily Signal.

“For Russia, security is only achievable if everyone else is insecure,” Blank said. “They’re not peacemakers, it’s a pretense. They want to force people to accept that Russia is important.”

The collapse of the cease-fire in Syria is the latest in a series of setbacks for U.S.-Russian relations.

Repeated attempts to cooperate in defusing conflicts in Ukraine and Syria have fallen flat. And a pattern of Russian warplane flybys of U.S. military aircraft and naval vessels in Eastern Europe, as well as allegations that the Kremlin is trying to influence the U.S. election through cyberattacks have exacerbated tensions.

Joint operations to support the International Space Station are among the last holdouts of post-Cold War cooperation between the U.S. and Russia.

Verbal sparring between Kerry and Lavrov at a United Nations Security Council meeting Wednesday highlighted how relations between Russia and the U.S. are at a post-Cold War nadir.

“Russia and the United States are in a state of conflict,” Blank said. “But it’s not a new Cold War. It’s a struggle between democracy and autocracy, not communism and capitalism.”

War of Words

The Syrian cease-fire, which went into effect Sept. 12, was dead on arrival, underscoring how far U.S.-Russia relations have deteriorated. The failed truce also highlighted intractable differences of opinion over key questions related to the war in Syria, such as the fate of the country’s ruler, Bashar al-Assad.

The 5-year-old war in Syria has displaced half of the country’s population and is estimated to have killed more than 400,000 people.

Fighting briefly ebbed last week in Syria after the cease-fire allegedly went into effect, but the war never stopped.

The cease-fire edged toward total collapse Monday night when, according to U.S. officials, Russian warplanes bombed a convoy transporting humanitarian aid to the 78,000 people trapped in the rebel-controlled city of Aleppo.

Twenty out of the convoy’s 31 trucks were destroyed, and about 20 people died, according to news reports.

The strikes were likely carried out by two Russian Su-24 warplanes, which were recorded as operating in the vicinity of the convoy, according to U.S. officials.

Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during Senate testimony on Thursday that either Russian or Syrian warplanes might have attacked the convoy.

“It was either the Russians or the regime,” Dunford said. “There’s no doubt in my mind that the Russians are responsible. I just don’t know whose aircraft actually dropped the bomb.”

At the U.N. on Wednesday, Kerry blamed Russia for the attack.

The Kremlin has subsequently suggested a series of alternative scenarios, including the possibility that a U.S. drone carried out the strike, or that the convoy was attacked from the ground by opposition forces fighting against the Assad government.

“I listened to my colleague from Russia and I sort of felt like we’re in a parallel universe here,” Kerry said in response to Lavrov’s remarks at Wednesday’s U.N. Security Council meeting.

Kerry called for a halt in Syrian and Russian airstrikes to allow the cease-fire to take hold.

Yet, as of Friday, Russian and Syrian airstrikes had resumed in Aleppo and a new offensive by Assad’s forces to take back the city had begun, according to news reports from the region.

Machinations

In a gambit to increase its importance on the world stage, Moscow has positioned itself as a key player in negotiating peace deals in conflicts it started, such as Ukraine, or elbowed its way into, as in Syria.

“I think Russia, through Putin, is the ultimate opportunist,” said Steven Bucci, visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies.

“They see U.S. weakness and exploit it,” Bucci, a former Army Special Forces commander, said. “I’m not sure if they want to be peace arbiters, but they want influence, and they need domestic control. Their growing engagements give them both. They are now seen as a serious player on the world stage, who many believe are more steady than the U.S. That turnaround is remarkable.”

Some experts claim that Russia has little genuine interest in ending the conflicts in Ukraine or Syria. The longer those conflicts last, some say, the longer Russia is able to remain relevant as a global power.

“That creaking sound you hear is Russia’s international credibility taking an additional hit,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters in Washington.

Modern Russia doesn’t have the Soviet Union’s military clout to force countries in Eastern Europe to succumb to its vassalage or to shape outcomes in other regions like the Middle East.

But the metrics of state power in the post-Cold War era are not defined by the ability to invade or subjugate countries. Russia has created diplomatic leverage in Ukraine and Syria through limited military operations, which exploit the reluctance of U.S. and European leaders to become entangled in those conflicts.

In 2013, Assad used chemical weapons against rebel-controlled pockets of the Damascus suburbs. The attacks killed about 1,500 civilians, including more than 400 children, and tested President Barack Obama’s “red line” warning to Assad—that the use of chemical weapons would spur a U.S. military response.

As the U.S. prepared to attack, Russia stepped in to arbitrate a last-minute deal to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles. The U.S. never launched punitive strikes, and Assad, a Moscow ally, remains entrenched in power.

“Russia is working hard to show the U.S. is not the leader it claims to be, but Russia is,” Bucci said. “They know Obama does not want or have the stomach for difficult foreign policy situations, and that Kerry is a incompetent negotiator. They are taking full advantage of that.”

In Ukraine, the more than 2-year-old conflict is in a perpetual holding pattern, periodically spiking in violence. Russia played a hand in brokering multiple failed cease-fires while it simultaneously and covertly armed pro-Russian separatists and deployed its own troops inside Ukraine.

“Nowhere is Russia’s intervention in internal affairs more brazen and bloody than in the conflict in Ukraine, which Russia continues to fuel by arming, training, and commanding so-called ‘separatists,’” Tom Malinowski, U.S. assistant secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, said during remarks at a Sept. 19 meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Warsaw, Poland.

“The Cold War was a global struggle between two power blocks—that’s not the case today,” Blank said. “Today, it’s a multipolar world order. Russia is upset they don’t have the status they had during the Cold War. They want to be coequal to the United States, but they’re not going to get it.” (For more from the author of “Syria Cease-Fire Collapse Highlights How Far US-Russia Relations Have Fallen” please click HERE)

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There is a memorial to murdered Ukrainian journalists on Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s central boulevard.

It’s a simple, nondescript metal plaque flanked by flowers on the side of a building. Some of the names are faded now, worn down by the years and the elements.

The names date from 1992, the first year after Ukraine gained its independence from the Soviet Union, underscoring how the fall of communism 25 years ago did not portend a new era of vibrant democratic culture in Ukraine.

Ukraine has spent much of the past quarter century under oligarchic thug rule, in which free and objective journalism was often seen as a nuisance to be controlled and manipulated—and sometimes a threat worth eliminating—by those in power.

And this summer, more than two years after Ukrainians took to the streets to overthrow the regime of former pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, a string of violent incidents against journalists and media outlets has rocked Ukraine’s capital.

Journalists are caught in the crossfire of those wishing to control the country (both in Kyiv and in Moscow), as well as targets of simmering anti-Russian sentiments due to the ongoing war in the east.

Journalists of all leanings have been targeted this summer, including government corruption watchdogs and those accused of maintaining a pro-Russian bias.

On July 20, Pavlo Sheremet, a well-known journalist in Ukraine for the news agency Ukrainska Pravda, was killed in a brazen car bomb attack in central Kyiv. Ukrainian officials requested the assistance of U.S. FBI investigators, but a motive has not yet been determined and officials have not named any suspects.

“I think the final aim was to scare or to intimidate Ukrainian journalists apart from or simultaneously trying to further destabilize the situation in the country,” said Andriy Kulykov, chairman of Hromadske Radio, during a broadcast interview for the independent Ukrainian radio news outlet.

“I don’t see that Ukrainian investigative journalists are limited in their duties or became scared and abandoned their jobs after Sheremet’s murder,” said Viktor Kovalenko, a Ukrainian journalist and former journalism professor.

“On the contrary, I see that now they are turning their eyes inside media society to find out how deeply Kremlin’s manipulators infiltrated and rule it according to their infowar against Ukraine,” Kovalenko added. “This attention to ourselves will help in cleaning, rethinking of journalism standards, and with actual rebirth of Ukrainian journalism.”

On the same day as Sheremet’s assassination, a knife-wielding man attacked Maria Rydvan, 25, an editor for Forbes Ukraine, as she was walking in a central Kyiv park.

“In park for no apparent reason a man ran to me and stabbed me three times… It’s all very strange,” Rydvan wrote on her Facebook page.

On Aug. 28, Russian journalist Alexander Shchetinin was found dead on the balcony of his Kyiv apartment. He died due to what police said was a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, according to Ukrainian news reports, and was discovered by friends who had come to celebrate his birthday.

Shchetinin renounced his Russian citizenship to be a Ukrainian citizen and founded the Kyiv-based New Region news agency.

Ukrainian officials are investigating Shchetinin’s death as a suicide. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, is pushing for his death to be “swiftly and thoroughly investigated.”

Without directly alleging that Shchetinin’s death was the result of foul play, Dunja Mijatovic, OSCE representative on freedom of the media, said Ukrainian officials should “improve the fragile situation regarding the safety of journalists and fully and effectively address the issue of impunity.”

Information Wars

On Sunday, the Kyiv offices of the TV news station Inter were set ablaze in an arson attack. Protesters had gathered outside the building to rally against the channel’s alleged pro-Russian bias, setting tires on fire and spray painting graffiti on the side of the building and on a fence hastily put up to keep them back.

One message read: “Inter—get out!” Another said: “Inter agents of Moscow.”

There were reports of minor injuries, but no deaths. Protesters barricaded Inter’s offices until Tuesday, when a deal was allegedly reached with the news agency, in which unspecified changes to Inter’s editorial policy were agreed upon.

“If the channel fails to observe the deal, the blockade will be resumed in a more radical way,” said Oleksiy Serdiuk, a protest leader, according to the Ukrainian news site Ukraine Today.

Many Ukrainians took to social media for a polarizing debate about the Inter incident.

Inter is commonly known among Ukrainians to harbor a pro-Russian bias, and after more than two years of war against pro-Russian separatists and Russian regulars in eastern Ukraine, and the murder of more than 100 protesters by the Yanukovych regime during the 2014 revolution, there is no love lost in Ukraine for those who promote Russian propaganda.

The arson attack against Inter on Sept. 4 was preceded by a Facebook post on Aug. 31 by Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, in which he pushed for the National Television and Radio Broadcasting Council and the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU (Ukraine’s equivalent of the FBI), to investigate Inter for “anti-Ukrainian” and “anti-state” propaganda.

Most Ukrainian officials condemned the Inter incident. Some also expressed concern about the perceived damage to Ukraine’s ongoing efforts to showcase the country’s progress toward a stable democracy worthy of deeper ties to the European Union and NATO.

“It’s clear that those who want to show a turbulent Ukraine suffering from destabilization and alike benefit from this,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman told Ukrainian media. “But it is important that the law enforcement system gives an adequate answer: who has done this, what was the aim, and, most important, those people should be punished.”

Kovalenko noted that the Kremlin exploits incidents like the Inter arson attack as part of an ongoing effort to destabilize Ukraine to undercut support from the U.S. and the EU.

“I treat an attack on Inter TV as another element of Kremlin’s infowar … and at the same time damage the reputation of the Ukrainian government abroad to force the West to weaken support in times of military aggression,” Kovalenko said. “Freedom of the press is a very sensitive value for Europe and the U.S., therefore, Moscow propagandists love to speculate on this to get the maximal level of media noise.”

The patience and resolve of the EU to maintain punitive economic sanctions on Moscow for its aggression in Ukraine will likely wear thin if Ukraine is perceived as slipping back into old authoritarian habits. And U.S. support for Ukraine—including military training programs and the delivery of limited nonlethal military hardware—could also dry up if Kyiv fails to show adequate progress in shoring up its democratic institutions.

“The whole world is watching you. That’s a fact,” U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said in an address to Ukraine’s parliament on Dec. 9. “They’re watching you because their hopes for your success as you fight both the unrelenting aggression of the Kremlin and the cancer of corruption will impact on them.”

Biden continued:

Ukraine’s moment. It may be your last moment. Please for the sake of the rest of us, selfishly on my part, don’t waste it. Seize the opportunity. Build a better future for the people of Ukraine.

(For more from the author of “Journalists Caught in the Crossfire of the Ukraine-Russia Conflict” please click HERE)

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