“When performing combat missions in Syria, not for a minute did we forget that we were defending Russia,” Sergei Surovikin, the new unified Russian battlefield commander in Ukraine, told an assembled crowd of elite army personnel at a ceremony in Moscow back in 2017.
Surovikin’s “defending” of Moscow’s interests in Syria involved dozens of air and ground attacks on civilian objects and infrastructure, according to a 2020 Human Rights Watch report, which said Russian forces under his command struck Syrian “homes, schools, healthcare facilities, and markets – the places where people live, work, and study”.
