At the annual press conference (which summarizes the state of affairs throughout the 2015), Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov announced Moscow's support for the Kurdish militias in northern Iraq. Russia is keen to point out that aid will pass through the official streets of Baghdad out of respect for Iraqi sovereignty. The blow to the US is immediate given the fact that American support in Syria for anti-Assad militias and YPG Kurds has circumvented the right to the integrity and sovereignty of the legitimate government of Damascus.
The presumed US support for the Kurds allows us to take stock of the Syrian game, in light of the results on the ground and the peace talks expected in Geneva.
It is now official that the UN representative for Syria Staffan De Mistura has preferred not to invite the Kurds of the PYD (Democratic Union, the main Kurdish party of Syria) to the negotiating table, which oversees the YPG, the Popular Protection Units, of made the armed forces of Syrian Kurdistan.
The choice would be due to a ultimatum of Turkey ready to boycott talks in the event of Kurdish presence.
The move makes the scenario clear, endorsing what was foreseen in this column in the previous months. The real actors of the Syrian scene are Turkey, Russia and Saudi Arabia. The confrontation between Ankara and Moscow is now at 360 °: the demolition of the Russian Sukhoi in November 2015 was not the cause but the consequence of a huge geopolitical friction in the area.
Turkey had to swallow the military defeat of ISIS north of Raqqa, where the defensive belt of the Royava (the Syrian West in the hands of the Kurds), appears firm. From Afrin to Al Hasakah, passing through Kobane, the entire Turkish-Syrian border at the end of January 2016 would be in the hands of the Kurds, except for some mountainous stretches north-east of Aleppo, an area of Turkmen interest (see article) heavily bombed by jets from Moscow and Damascus. 
Recognizing the existence of a Syrian Kurdish interlocutor for Turkey would be suicide: it would give the PKK, ideologically affiliated with the PYD, sap and imply a tacit renunciation of the plan to incorporate a slice of Syrian territory to create a buffer of Turkish culture to protect the south boundaries.
The interactions between ISIS and Ankara are to be understood essentially in this key that clashes with the official declarations to combat terrorism. There are many voices that speak of a strategy of tension in Turkey (attacks in Istanbul) that would obtain the double result of saving the Turkish image in front of the international community and at the same time allowing an increase in the military presence on the south-eastern borders.
Against this design, Moscow moves for weeks against Turkish border maneuvers and now sits at the negotiating table as an older (and muscular) brother of Damascus. Now the author of Assad's foreign policy, which owes her survival, Russia becomes the main Turkish enemy in the Syrian game, opposing the exclusion of the Kurds from the peace negotiations.
Precisely because of the great weight gained in the region, Russia also ends up opposing Saudi interests. The Russian Air Force is responsible for the killing in December of Zehran Alloush, head of Jaysh to Islam,Army of Islam referent of Saudi Arabia in Syria. The philosophical groups summoned for the Vienna negotiations would also have threatened the boycott because of the lack of a representative of Zeharan's forces. The United States would be mediating on the question, whose position in Syria becomes more and more nasty every day.
Officially sponsor of the Kurds in anti-ISIS function, the USA clashes with the diktat of Turkey which concretely establishes the times of the American strategy. Washington would find itself in a delicate situation of balance between the renewed relationship with Iran allied with Assad and Saudi Arabia increasingly irritated by the defeats of the Free Syrian Army, now chased everywhere by regular Syrian troops and Russian bombing.
To protect Sunni interests in the country it seems that Riyadh has no choice but to rely on Ankara and pressure on Washington. In this chaos America is embarrassed and Moscow is gloating.
(Photo: الجيش العربي السوري / TASS)
