Over the last month or so, the shadow of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has loomed large across the Middle East. In March, he visited the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. He was soon back in the region, visiting Egypt and Iran on April 12-13.

The 10-year commemoration of Syria’s bloody civil conflict in March has evoked expressions of anguish and some new diplomatic initiatives.
Nearly half-a-million people have been killed and several million more displaced since the conflict started on March 15, 2011.

Last year, as the world reeled from the ravages of the pandemic, it saw the consolidation of a strategic alignment that has made Russia and China partners in an ambitious enterprise: The reshaping of Eurasia at the heart of a new world order.

Ten years after an innocuous piece of graffiti scrawled on the walls of Deraa by some children led to fratricidal confrontations across Syria, the figures of death and destruction are mind-boggling as nearly half-a-million Syrians are now dead.