Russia shows what it can do in 'warm waters'

The Russian desire to reach the ?warm waters? of the Mediterranean goes back to before the First World War. The copyright belongs to foreign minister Sergei Sazonov of Tsarist Russia. Sazonov was actually the third signatory of the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, along with Britain and France, aiming to divide the collapsing Ottoman Empire into zones of control. In an earlier letter to the British and French ambassadors to St. Petersburg, Sazanov clearly stated that he wanted control of Istanbul and also a mandate for the Armenian-populated eastern Anatolia.

He got what he wanted in the Sykes-Picot agreement. Actually, when that secret agreement was first revealed (in a very WikiLeaks way, to the Manchester Guardian) by Vladimir Lenin and Lev Trotsky, over the course of the 1918 Brest-Litovsk agreement negotiations after the 1917 communist revolution in Russia, it was for some time known as the Sykes-Picot-Sazonov agreement. History was later re-written during the Stalinist era and Russia?s role in the agreement was somehow erased. 

The French and the British had decided to divide the southern areas of the Turkish empire according to the known oil fields of the time. Its mention of Jews and Kurds was ignored, and the agreement was ill-born anyway, declared null by the 1920 Paris Agreement that marked the end of WWI. Nevertheless, in the years since the agreement has always been condemned as proof of imperialist plots in the Middle East. Even former British Foreign Minister Jack Straw admitted during his tenure that it was the source of many problems in the region today.

Today, Russia is mainly aiming to protect its interests and maintain its military base in Syria, its only one in the entire Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean....