Details of Russia’s military campaign in Syria:

• The Russian Defense Ministry said on Nov. 28 that Syrian government troops have taken control over nearly half of the rebel-held Syrian city of Aleppo in a new offensive. The ministry said that government forces are in control of 12 neighborhoods, or roughly 40% of the city. (AP, 11.28.16)
• Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the Russian Defense Ministry and the Emergency Situations Ministry to send mobile hospitals to the Syrian city of Aleppo as soon as possible. (RFE/RL, 11.29.16)
• According to an anonymous source at Russia’s Defense Ministry, the Nov. 13 crash of a Russian fighter jet trying to land on the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier was caused by a snafu with a cable aboard the carrier and the subsequent failure of both the plane’s engines. (Gazeta.ru, 11.23.16)

Response to Russia’s military campaign in Syria:

• U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has said: “I'd say this in front of thousands of people … wouldn't it be nice if we actually got along with Russia, wouldn't it be nice if we went after ISIS together, which is, by the way, aside from being dangerous, it's very expensive, and ISIS shouldn't have been even allowed to form, and the people will stand up and give me a massive hand.” (New York Times, 11.23.16)

Risk of accidental or intentional confrontation between Western and Russian forces in Syria:

• U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has said: “I had to listen to [Senator] Lindsey Graham, who, give me a break. I had to listen to Lindsey Graham talk about, you know, attacking Syria and attacking, you know, and it's like you're now attacking Russia, you're attacking Iran, you're attacking. And what are we getting? We're getting—and what are we getting? And I have some very definitive, I have some very strong ideas on Syria.” (New York Times, 11.23.16)

Strategies and actions recommended:

• From “Advice to President Trump on U.S.-Russia Policy ,” a multi-part symposium commissioned by The National Interest and Carnegie Corporation of New York:
  • Graham Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs: “First and foremost, the next U.S. President must do everything possible to prevent an accidental U.S.-Russian war, now the likeliest it’s been since the end of the Cold War. Overturning President [Barack] Obama’s ban on communication at every level from President-to-President to Secretaries of Defense and regional commanders; de-conflicting in Syria, multilateralization of U.S-Russian agreements on preventing military incidents and similar confidence-building measures in the military-to-military domain—all should help reduce the risk.” (The National Interest , 11.28.16)
  • Executive director of the Center for the National Interest, Paul J. Saunders: “As an immediate objective, the Trump administration would do well to broaden U.S.-Russian military-to-military contacts both to avoid inadvertent conflict in Syria and to agree on limits to provocative conduct along European-Russian frontiers.” (The National Interest , 11.28.16)
  • Steven Pifer, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former U.S. ambassador: U.S. President-elect Donald Trump “should early on establish clear policy lines toward Russia, including reaffirmation of NATO’s decision to modestly boost its military presence in the Baltic states and Poland,… support for Ukraine and the German-led effort to end the fighting in eastern Ukraine and … readiness to cooperate on areas where U.S. and Russian interests converge. (The National Interest , 11.28.16)
• Journalist David Ignatius: “As Don Corleone convened the ‘five families’ in ‘The Godfather,’ so, too, might [U.S. President-elect Donald] Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin gather the United States, Russia, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia. But experts warn against ‘Yalta II’—a new Russian-American attempt to designate ‘spheres of influence’ that would carve up the region.” (The Washington Post, 11.22.16)

Analysis:

• Political analyst Maxim Suchkov: “Moscow believes it now has the opportunity and time to make critical gains in Syria. Russian airstrikes in the Idlib and Homs provinces as well as the Syrian army offensive in Aleppo seem to be building on this line of reasoning.“ (Al Monitor, 11.21.16)
• The Syrian army has seized several key districts from rebel forces in the eastern part of the Syrian city of Aleppo. Russian experts believe that the Syrian government and the countries supporting them (Russia and Iran) are trying to achieve as much as possible before the change of the U.S. administration, in order to have the new U.S. president, Donald Trump, face facts: The opposition's battle for Aleppo is lost. (Kommersant/RBTH, 11.29.16)
• With the Syrian government making large territorial gains in the city of Aleppo on Nov. 28, routing rebel fighters and sending thousands of people fleeing for their lives, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is starting to look as if he may survive the uprising, even in the estimation of some of his staunchest opponents. Yet, Assad's victory, should he achieve it, may well be pyrrhic: He would rule over an economic wasteland hampered by a low-level insurgency with no end in sight, diplomats and experts in the Middle East and elsewhere say. (New York Times, 11.28.16)

Other important news:

• U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is engaged in a furious if implausible diplomatic effort to strike a deal with Russia to end the siege of the Syrian city of Aleppo. The strategy is to narrow the focus of the negotiations to cover Aleppo only, and to broaden the format to include Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and, at times, Iran. (The Washington Post, 11.27.16)
• U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's eldest son, emerging as a potential envoy for the president-elect, held private discussions with diplomats, businessmen and politicians in Paris in October that focused in part on finding a way to cooperate with Russia to end the Syrian war, according to people who took part in the meetings. (Wall Street Journal, 11.25.16)
• Turkey’s state-run news agency said on Nov. 25 that the presidents of Turkey and Russia have discussed developments in Syria, a day after three Turkish soldiers were killed in what Ankara claims was a Syrian government airstrike. (AP, 11.25.16)
• Italian newspaper La Stampa has published an article by Russian President Vladimir Putin in which Putin outlines Russia’s position on the fight against terrorism and calls on states to unite against the threat of radical fundamentalism. The article, in which the Russian leader refers to the U.S. as a “mighty power,” pays special attention to Putin’s position on international terrorism. (Gazeta.ru/RBTH, 11.28.16)
• U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Nov. 25 named libertarian election lawyer Donald F. McGahn as his White House counsel and hard-line former Reagan administration official Kathleen "KT" McFarland as his deputy national security adviser. In 2013, after U.S. President Barack Obama opted against a military strike against the Syrian government’s chemical weapons stockpiles, McFarland wrote that Russian President Vladimir Putin deserved the credit for using diplomacy to stave off the attack. “The world knows that Vladimir Putin is the one who really deserves that Nobel Peace Prize,” she wrote on FoxNews.com in September 2013. (The Washington Post, 11.25.16, Bloomberg, 11.25.16)