In other words, every soldier killed makes it that less able to hold ground. In a war of attrition, Assad will lose.

Assad being Putin's ally, Putin could send munitions to help Assad but that's not the problem that needs a solution, is it? Assad needs boots on the ground.

Putin, however, has a domestic problem. Dead soldiers from the Donbas. Soldiers who are of questionable loyalty, since they were former Ukrainian soldiers. Soldiers who've fought in the Donbas and shouldn't be out and about spreading tales out of school. Kadyrovtsy who need someplace to show their manhood by killing and maiming people in support of whatever.

Turkey's a bit of a problem, because it has no love for Assad. But the chaos on the border is finally not to its liking. The refugees were a problem, to be sure, but the uppity Kurds responding to being killed by actually fighting back? Damn, don't they have the common sense to know that they have an obligation to let their superiors kill them?

Any side-effect for Europe is that. Otherwise we again not only see the tail wagging the dog, but the tail lifting up the dog and bashing it to bits on the ground.

I hadn't considered that Putin would use Syria as a dumping ground for inconvenient Russian troops.

The article you link (but do not actually quote from) is sourced entirely to the State Department speculating about this supposed escalation, for which no evidence is presented.

State is so confident in its own bullshit that even it hedges its bets:

"If such reports were accurate, these actions could further escalate the conflict, lead to greater loss of innocent life, increase refugee flows and risk confrontation with the anti-Isil coalition operating in Syria," the state department said, using an alternative acronym for Islamic State (IS).

Your post pretends this "escalation" is established and dramatic and dishes up your own completely made-up speculation about why the Hitlerian Darth Vader Superevil Putin is doing this, namely to destroy Europe, etc. etc. Pathetic.

Meanwhile, people in Syria is fleeing Daesh ("ISIS&quot and other Islamist extremist militias as much as they are fleeing Assad's regime. The U.S. and even more so the Gulf allies are arming al-Qaeda splinters in Syria.

Daesh is the product of two factors:

1) the U.S. war of aggression on Iraq, which destroyed that nation and destabilized Syria - through four million refugees from Iraq, note. Thus your post is a case of projection. The US government actually did to Syria what you fantasize Putin is doing to Europe.

2) Gulf states arming the worst of the forces fighting Assad.

There's your "escalation" for you.

To dismiss the US State Department and the BBC as unreliable sources of information on global affairs is the sort of thing one typically hears in Kremlin press releases and paid sockpuppet trolling.

And to smarmily dismiss criticism of Vladimir Putin - a mass-murdering dictator who has journalists who criticize him assassinated - as some kind of paranoid conspiracism is the most obvious tell in your totally ridiculous reply.

I'm not interested in boilerplate propaganda issued from a St. Petersburg basement. No one is.

You don't even read what I wrote. You don't read what's in the BBC or the State statements. State is dishing up propaganda, but it's conditional, weak, without details. Anyone who can read - I did - can see that. They certainly don't support your fear-mongering bullshit. The way you talk about Putin is exactly how the war party talked about Saddam back in 2003. If one criticized U.S. policy back then, one was called a Saddam lover, etc. I've been attacking Putin since before it became fashionable among chickenhawks. His badness doesn't justify the nonsense you're dishing up, or the way you abuse the sources you pretend support your bullshit.