Since its military intervention in the Syrian civil war in September 2015, one of Russia’s major foreign policy goals has been to convince Gulf Arab monarchies to come to terms with the survival of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and the reacceptance of its “legitimacy”.
A host of developments in Gulf-Syrian relations during the past few years, most recently al-Assad’s visit to the United Arab Emirates, indicate that this Russian strategy has been quite successful.
