PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin was always on a hiding to nothing when he ordered Russian forces to intervene in the long-running civil war in Syria by attacking targets across the country. His reasoning was that the aircraft would join the air campaign against Daesh (also called Islamic State) and contribute towards its destruction, but Western allies in the US coalition claimed that he was effectively bolstering the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and that the attacks would “only fuel more extremism and radicalisation”.

Operations began last week with Russian warplanes flying out of their base at Latakia, and the first 18 sorties targeted positions in eastern Syria such as Aleppo, Idlib and Homs where there is no Daesh presence on the ground. On Friday when the focus of the attacks turned to the Daesh stronghold of Raqqa, those same critics claimed that Putin was doing nothing to degrade the Islamic extremists but was simply diverting attention from his country’s confrontation with Ukraine.

As ever in the affairs of the Middle East, it is not always easy to understand motives and at the same time it is not difficult to see ulterior motives. That is the case with Russia’s intervention. As a long-standing friend of Assad, whose removal from power has been demanded by the US and its allies as a pre-condition for ending the war, Putin’s move was seen as unhelpful at best and opportunist at worst. Ever since his forces intervened in the affairs of Ukraine and annexed Crimea, Putin has been viewed as a reckless expansionist who will stop at nothing to increase Russian influence. As several critics have said, Putin is a master at exploiting a vacuum.

Syria just seemed to be another cog in that policy but the reality is that Putin does have motives in sending his forces to the country, quite apart from the fact that they seem to be supporting Assad against Washington’s wishes. Seen from his point of view, Putin wants to achieve the following goals: he wants to distract attention from the confrontation in Ukraine and thereby improve his country’s standing in the international community; he wants Russia to look like an international power-broker in the Middle East acting boldly where Western policy has not only failed but has made matters worse; and he wants to bolster his standing amongst the Russian people by proving to them that their country is still a power in the world.

It is also possible that he has been sufficiently moved by Islamic extremism to feel threatened by it – Russia has a substantial Muslim population – and wants to destroy Daesh before it is a danger to his own country. Russia has its own problems with Islamic extremism, not just in Moscow but also in the Caucasian republics of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, which have been subjected to suicide bombings, hostage-taking and civil unrest. In 2007 Chechen separatists founded the Caucasus Emirate, which is on the US State Department’s list of international terrorist groups and which claimed responsibility for the bombing of Domodedovo International Airport, in which at least 36 people were killed. The Caucasus Emirate also has close links with Daesh and two years ago a Chechen known as Emir Salauddin was appointed as its official representative in Syria.

All this provides the Russian president with motives that go beyond international power-broking and accounts for Putin’s calls for the creation of an international coalition to take on and defeat Daesh. It also accounts for the gung-ho attitude adopted by his military colleagues, who gave off-the-record briefings claiming that the earlier airstrikes by the US-led coalition had achieved nothing and amounted to little more that “pointlessly bombing the desert”. The same officials admit that their campaign will not be over quickly and could last until the end of the year. It seems a fair assumption – the aerial campaigns against Iraq in 2003 achieved little in the long term – but it comes at a risk.

Memories of the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan are still strong in Russia and there are fears that this latest intervention could become an open cheque. This time round it could be complicated if Russia’s support for Assad, an Alawite Shia, merely adds fuel to the current confrontation with Daesh and other Syrian rebels who are all Sunni.