The goal of Russia’s intervention is therefore not to contribute to the “struggle against terrorism,” as the Kremlin’s propagandists claim, but to restore political control, at any cost, to the regime that spawned the terrorism in the first place. More precisely, Russia’s aim is to rescue (after a long period of arm’s-length support) a dictatorship that American and French authorities describe as being responsible for causing more than 250,000 deaths since 2011.