How did the Syrian regime and its Russian ally use humanitarian gestures to bolster their war effort, and could the same thing happen in Ukraine?
, a south-eastern city in which hundreds of thousands of people are trapped. The corridors would have led to enemy territory: either to Russia itself, or to allied Belarus. Some Syrians darkly wondered if Russia would bring in a fleet of green buses, as the regime did in Syria, where they became a symbol of desperate wartime evacuations.
The reality was darker. First, civilians and aid convoys were often targets. The Syrian army fired on the first convoy to leave besieged Aleppo in December 2016, which carried injured civilians. A day later, Syrian troops pulled men off evacuation buses and shot them on the side of the road. Aid shipments were regularly bombed by either Syrian or Russian jets.
Humanitarian gestures also gave Russia and Syria a way to manage the battlefield. Facing a nationwide rebellion, the Syrian army could not afford to fight on all fronts. Local truces allowed it to freeze the conflict in particular regions until it had the manpower to retake them. A study in 2021 by researchers at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, a think-tank, found that the regime announced no fewer than 30 unilateral ceasefires during the war.
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