Portuguese representative Jose Filipe Moraes Cabral, left, and South African representative Baso Sangqu, right, glance at Russian representative Vitaly Churkin, center, as they vote in support of a draft resolution backing an Arab League call for Syrian President Bashar Assad to step down during a meeting of the United Nations Security Council at United Nations headquarters on Feb. 4, 2012.
Russia wants no repeat of a Libyan-style western military intervention in Syria, its long-standing and vital ally, and instead is seeking to unilaterally manage a power shift in Damascus.
Last spring, a reluctant Russia (and an even more reluctant China) agreed under heavy pressure and vague assurances from Washington, Paris and London to a Security Council resolution imposing a no-fly zone over Libya and the authority to intervene to protect besieged and attacked civilians.
Moscow felt burned by the Libyan war when Western powers morphed the Security Council mandate into a licence to wage an air war for regime change, backing rebels to topple Moammar Gadhafi.
"We will not allow repetition of the Libyan scenario," said Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. That was long before Moscow made good on its vow, along with China, to veto a UN resolution calling for the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
But irking Washington and the Arab League by flexing its great power veto at the Security Council also puts Moscow on the spot.
If not a UN-mandated pressure, then what's Moscow's plan?
Mr. Lavrov was headed Tuesday to Damascus, seeking to prove that Russia remains a powerful player in the Middle East, where Arab Spring uprisings have swept away decades of repressive stasis.
Other key players – notably Iran, a Syrian ally that also has close relations with Moscow and will need Russia's backing for its own confrontation with Washington over Iran's suspected nuclear weapons development program – will pay close attention to Moscow's dealing with Damascus.
"Russia's overwhelming objective is to salvage something from the wreckage of the Assad regime and contain Western influence in its most important Arab ally," Shashank Joshi, an associate fellow at Britain's Royal United Services Institute, a military think tank, told Reuters. Moscow's best hope of maintaining influence may be "a controlled demolition, of sorts – a managed transition to a new regime, shorn of Bashar but built around the loyalists of the Assad dynasty."
If that fails and a full-blown civil war erupts, Moscow's risky gambit to veto at the UN and then try to go it alone could backfire.
"Russia and China will, I think, come to regret this decision, which has aligned them with a dying dictator whose days are numbered, and put them at odds with the Syrian people and the entire region," Washington's UN ambassador Susan Rice said on Monday.
But Moscow can't afford a repeat of the Libyan intervention that effectively sidelined Russia, no matter how many Syrian protesters are being slaughtered.
"No one in the Security Council ever mentioned regime change," recalled Hardeep Singh Puri, India's ambassador to the UN, who was in the room when the Libya resolution was thrashed out. India, Brazil and even NATO's ally Germany abstained.
The current Russian strategy in Syria also reflects the power behind the Kremlin throne.
Vladimir Putin, once and likely future Russian president, isn't about to lose key strategic partners in the Middle East. Nor will he accept a replay of the Libyan intervention that he denounced as "Medieval calls for Crusades."
The younger Assad, like his even-tougher father Hafez before him, has been loyal to Moscow for decades. He may need to be jettisoned. Far more important is Russia's continuing stake in Syrian affairs – billions in trade, significant arms sales and Russia's only naval base on the Mediterranean.
The Syrian-Iran alliance remains the axis of Russian influence in the Middle East. Losing Syria would diminish Russia's reputation among its dwindling circle of allies beyond the old Soviet empire.
With a report from AFP
Editor's Note: Iran's nuclear program is believed by many to include a plan to develop nuclear weapons. An earlier version of this story did not make that clear. This version has been corrected.