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."
And so the first combat deployment of the Kuznetsov aircraft carrier represents another attempt to mimic the US's military power. "They have one aircraft carrier — it's not the most reliable," Gorenburg said of the Kuznetsov, which had to be towed almost 3,000 miles back to Russia after breaking down near France and Spain in 2012.
Gorenburg pointed out that the Kuznetsov approached Syria bearing new aircraft: MiG-29Ks. But these naval variants, suited for the type of strike missions necessary in Syria, haven't yet been put to combat use. Additionally, one of the MiG-29Ks crashed Monday when returning to the ship.
In part, Gorenburg said, the naval deployment to Syria could be seen as a sales pitch, as Russia hopes to export cruise missiles and aircraft: "They've used the Syria conflict for showing off their arms for customers, but that's more with regular [not naval] aircraft."
The real purpose behind the deployment, however, he said, is "more to demonstrate to NATO and the US that they have this capability, and it's something else you have to keep in mind."
Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, echoed Gorenburg's statements to the Washington Examiner: "There's not a kinetic effect that they bring that can't already be brought with the forces that they have there."
"From a pure military perspective, Russia already has significant capabilities inside Syria," Davis said. "They have nearly two dozen strike aircraft that are based there."
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