THE GOOD KIND OF M.A.D.:

There's enough noise about the increased Russian presence in the Latakia area for Russian media to speculate about a "second hybrid war" and "getting bogged down" in Syria as the Soviet Union did in Afghanistan and Putin's Russia did in eastern Ukraine. [...]

 The "demonstration of power" idea must be tempting. Russian troops have only proven their effectiveness in small local conflicts recently -- the swift operation against Georgia, the bloodless occupation of unprotected Crimea, a couple of successful battles against a weak Ukrainian military. A success where, as Putin noted last week, the U.S.-led campaign of airstrikes is failing to stop the advance of ISIS would advertise Russia as a force to reckon with outside its home region. On the other hand, allowing the anti-Assad forces -- ISIS or other rebel groups -- to seize Latakia and then perhaps the small Russian naval base in Tartus would suggest Russian weakness, something Putin hates to allow. The facility, which in peacetime had just four Russian naval personnel taking care of occasional vessel repairs, now appears to house hundreds of marines arriving on ships such as the Nikolai Filchenkov.

Putin doesn't really need a deal with the U.S. to step up that presence. All he requires is quiet on the Ukrainian front to free the Russian military from distractions -- and indeed, in recent days, all fighting there has stopped, as if by magic. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko even said last week that the Minsk ceasefire agreement was truly being observed for the first time since it was signed in February. 

Going into Syria would be the same kind of bold move as the Crimea annexation: Putin would try to win first and negotiate later. Many of the servicemen being sent to Syria now are from Crimean bases. The difficulty is that ISIS is not the cowed, disorganized Ukrainian military of March 2014. It has repeatedly proved its military prowess both against Assad's forces and the Western-trained Iraqi army. Russian generals may be telling Putin they can beat ISIS, but then Soviet generals also told Leonid Brezhnev in 1979 that they could overrun Afghanistan.

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