In early 2011, three years before Euromaidan, the Middle East was convulsed by popular uprisings, the Arab Spring. First, Tunisia's long-serving president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was driven from power. Then, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, another long-serving authoritarian, was ousted by protestors. The uprising convulsed Libya too, but Muammar Gaddafi turned his guns on peaceful protestors. When the protestors fought back, the country slid into civil war. Prompted by pressure from the Arab world and Europe, the UN Security Council authorized a NATO-led intervention to protect Libyan civilians. Russia abstained in that vote, a bone of contention between its president, Dmitry Medvedev, and prime minister, Putin. Oman, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain and Yemen also experienced mass uprisings. The first three used limited political reform and economic incentives to mollify the crowds; the government in Bahrain restored order violently with the help of Saudi military intervention; Yemen careered into civil war.

It was Syria, however, that loomed largest. The uprising there led to a bloody civil war, the rise of the radical jihadist Islamic State (IS), and drew in Iran, Hezbollah, the US, the UK, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey and Russia.

Before Crimea, Medvedev and then Putin had steered a course focused on preventing Bashar al-Assad's violent overthrow without direct military intervention. In autumn 2015, however, Putin ordered the Russian military into Syria to prop-up Assad's flagging regime, his position hardened by three considerations: Western timidity which created a vacuum he was happy to fill; fear that Assad faced imminent defeat; and confidence in the capacity of Russian military force to achieve its political goals of defending Assad, extending Russian influence into the Middle East, and forcing the West to acknowledge Russia's great power status by making itself indispensable to peace in Syria. Taking advantage of Western timidity, disunity and confusion, Putin ended Russia's brief post-Crimea diplomatic isolation by positioning itself as the great and indispensable power necessary for peace in Syria. But victory in Syria came at a terrible price: a civil war that consumed more than half a million lives and displaced more than half Syria's pre-war population. The Syrian government and its allies were responsible for around 90 per cent of all civilian deaths, Russian forces alone killed at least 7,000 Syria civilians.