ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses German, Polish and Finnish leaders’ discourses on Russia in the context of the Syrian crisis, between 2015 and 2018. It shows how discourses on Russia related to other topical and heated contemporary debates, notably those concerning the refugee crisis and terrorism. The chapter reveals that national discourses eventually converged on the criticism of Russia’s bombing campaign and human rights violations. This criticism was grounded in deep-seated national conceptualisations of the use of force in international politics. However, the national leaders under investigation had different views and put different emphasis on how to address Russia’s involvement in the Syrian crisis. Up until the 2000s, post-Soviet Russia appeared to have limited interest in the MENA region. It had some important customers for its arms exports and an uneasy partnership with Syria, which also hosted the only remaining base of the Russian navy outside the former Soviet Union.
