President Vladimir Putin's decision to intervene in Syria marked a major turning point in Russian foreign policy in 2015. Over the last 15 years, Putin has increasingly relied on the use of military power to achieve his domestic and foreign-policy objectives, starting with the invasion of Chechnya in 1999, then of Georgia in 2008, and then of Ukraine in 2014. Putin's Syria gambit was the logical, if dramatic, next step in Russia's increasingly aggressive foreign policy. Read more...