On Tuesday, November 17, 2015, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officially announced that the crash of A321 plane en route to St. Petersburg in Sinai was caused by a terrorist attack. When the Metrojet Flight 9268 crashed on October 31, killing all 224 people aboard, Russian media didn’t even list terrorist act as one of the possible causes of the catastrophe. Why? Some thought that Vladimir Putin is horrified that Russians would blame him for starting bombing Syria, triggering retaliation of ISIS. Others, on the contrary, thought that the terrorist act would trigger the desire of the most of Russians to increase military operations against ISIS. It was difficult to predict the Russian reaction.
In the spring of this year, a threat from “Islamic state” – a terrorist organization banned in Russia, did not seem so obvious to most of the Russians. In the spring surveys the ISIS was almost unnoticeable in the list of “enemies” of the country, and the surveys recorded a weak interest in the Syrian conflict. Now Russian public opinion has changed.
According to the October 5, 2015 Levada Center survey, more than two-thirds of respondents see an “Islamic state” as a threat, which justified the application of air strikes by Russia (72%) and by France (63%).
The participation of Russian aviation in Syria the respondents considered primarily as a desire of the political leadership of the country to support Bashar al-Assad in the fight against both ISIS and his opposition (47%). One third of Russians (28%) were against the Russian military involvement in the Syrian conflict. The notion that the struggle between Russia and the “Islamic state” is an occasion to establish contacts with the West, has not found support among the population (only 8% of Russians believe that the country should join the Western coalition in the fight against the ISIS and the regime of Bashar al-Assad). One in five respondents could not explain the bombing, 10% were undecided and 8% new nothing about them.
Russians seem to have a sober look at the consequences of Russia’s participation in the Syrian conflict: 78% of respondents do not exclude the possibility that it could turn into a “new” Afghanistan for the country. 46% of Russians approve of (and 33% against) the decision of the Duma authorizing the use of Russian troops abroad. The approval of military intervention is declarative in nature and reflects the trend of the general approval by the Russians of all the actions of their authorities, which was established in the recent years rather than the real support of Russia’s participation in the war. In September 2015 69% of Russians were opposed to direct military support of the Syrian leadership as well as self proclaimed Donbas republics.
49% of Russians believe that Russia and the United States will manage to find common ground on the issue of settlement of the situation in Syria (the majority of the population does not want it, as it is still under the “anti-Western obsession”). One third of respondents (30%) believe that the today’s Russian Middle East policy will not give positive results for the settlement of Russian-American relations.
Nevertheless on Tuesday, November 17, 2015, the day when official information that the terrorist attack was the cause of the Russian plane’s crash was released, Supreme Commander Vladimir Putin visited the National Control Center of the Ministry of Defense (the War Room) to inspect the combat operations of Russian forces all over the word. Andrei Kolesnikov (favorite Putin’s journalist) covered the event in the popular Russian paper Kommersant. He discovered that the Russian military operations in Syria had increased multifold and “the war is already going on and now is the time to think about what will be the post-war reorganization of the world, which will bring together the winners and how they will divide the world.”
