Why Russia sailed its navy thousands of miles to Syria when doing so brings ‘nothing’ to the battle

On Tuesday, the Russian Ministry of Defense released a handful of videos glorifying its Mediterranean naval campaign to support Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Cruise missiles were seen launching vertically from destroyers, tipping sideways, and then rocketing toward the Syrian city of Aleppo. The videos also showed operations aboard Russia’s sole aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov.

But according to experts, as flashy as this naval show of force may be, it added nothing toward the completion of Russia’s military objectives.

“It’s mostly for show,” Dmitry Gorenburg, a senior research scientist at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian studies, told Business Insider.

According to Gorenburg, hauling an aircraft carrier, a nuclear-powered battle cruiser, two destroyers, a tanker, and the tug boat that accompanies the aircraft carrier in case of a breakdown “didn’t add anything” to Russia’s military capability in Syria but was instead meant to have “caught everyone’s attention.”

“There’s been an effort over the last few years to show that Russia has some of the same capabilities as the US,” Gorenburg said. “One prominent example was those cruise-missile strikes from the Caspian Sea, to show that they have the standoff cruise-missile capability.”

Read the whole story from Business Insider.

Featured image courtesy of Jane’s Defense.