the limping messenger

A SYRIAN SEVASTOPOL?
Allied Forces including France and soon Britain (again) together with Turkey on a battlefield not far from the southern border of what became Russian territory by annexation in by the end of the 18th century: the Crimea.

The downing of a Russian airplane by the Turkish today may be seen as a step toward another Russian heroic stand a new Sevastopol?
Russians defending what all imperial nations like to call the mother or fatherland. Thus in the 19th century the French, British, Ottomans and Sardinians laid a siege to Sevastopol in the years 1854-55, so did the troops of the Third Reich in 1941-42. In both cases the Russian troops supported by most of – except the authochton Crimean Tartars – the local population, held heroically out for a long time, in the end losing these prolonged and murderous battles. Sevastopol thus became a symbol of Russians defending their values from Tsarist led Orthodox Christianism to Bolshevist led nationalism and beyond, with the new mix of Russion nationalism, corporate state system and revived Orthodox Church values under Putin.
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The Crimean War saw the unholy alliance of Western European empires with the Ottoman Empire against what they saw as ‘a threat of Tsarist Orthodox Christian Russia. The Middle East War of today again has such an alliance in the form of NATO with the new Ottomans, the last under the new strong man of Turkey Erdogan, shooting down a Russian war plane.
NO MORE SEVASTOPOL can be read from Putin’s eyes.
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Where can we situate that ‘new Sevastopol’ of the 21st century?
In Syria, the Russian naval base at Tartus leased from the (socialist) Syrian Ba’at party of the Assad dynasty since 1971. It is very close to Turkey. It gives Russia a free access to the whole of the Mediterranean waters, without being forced to go through the Turkish controlled Bosporus.
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EU/USA and NATO have been destabilising the Southern part of Russia by discarding the Cold War entente for a Hot War future scenario. Russian’s long involvement in Syria is strategic. So is it’s actual alliance with the Assad regime. The downing of a Russian war plane (over Turkish territory) is a step toward an unwanted war, that reminds of the disasters of the Crimean War in the mid of the 19th century.
Historic battles lost tend to become mythical references of nationalist history.
There was a lack of any anti-warmongers movement during the Crimean War of the 19th century, even when many Russians, Turks, Brits and Frenchmen, African troops, died in battle and of disease.
We seem to have very little real size opposition against what I like to call from now on THE MIDDLE EAST WAR… time to change that.
NO MORE SEVASTOPOL!