Almost half of Russians say the Kremlin should withdraw from its military campaign in Syria, according to the results of a Levada Center poll published Tuesday.
Some 49 percent of respondents said Russia’s intervention in the Syrian conflict should end while 30 percent, less than one-third, were in favor of Russia’s continued involvement in the conflict, now in its sixth year.
Russia entered the Syrian war in 2015 with a series of airstrikes it said targeted Islamic State, a banned terrorist organization in Russia. The Kremlin’s intervention on the side of Bashar Assad is widely seen as having turned the tide of the war in favor of the regime.
Almost one-third of respondents, 32 percent, said Russia’s campaign in Syria was in danger of becoming a “new Afghanistan,” referring to the Soviet Union’s decade long war with the Taliban in Afghanistan, which cost more than 10,000 lives.