The west cannot trade Ukraine for help in Syria

In Parisian cafés and concert halls, and in the skies over Sinai, hundreds of French and Russian citizens have fallen victim to Islamist terrorism. The result has been the beginnings of an alliance between the French and Russian militaries to fight Isis. France’s president, François Hollande, will next week visit Moscow and Washington to try to broaden the co-operation. Efforts are under way at the UN Security Council finally to agree a resolution on a common war against jihadis in Syria.

Co-operation between western countries and Russia in this battle makes some sense. But it should be clearly delineated, have ground rules, and pursue agreed goals. Above all, it should involve no unsavoury compromises over Moscow’s meddling in Ukraine, which risked spreading Middle East-style turmoil to the heart of Europe.

Conditions for an alliance in Syria should include commitments from Russia to concentrate its forces on attacking Isis positions. There should be agreement that while every effort is made to preserve Syria’s state institutions, any settlement should include the departure of president Bashar al-Assad, even if after a transition period.

The goal should be a ceasefire between the Syrian government and non-Isis rebels to prepare the ground for a decisive assault on Isis. Russia should help, too, by stopping the Assad regime’s barrel-bombing of rebel areas, and creating an Isis-free “safe zone” in north-west Syria for displaced Syrians.

Western capitals should, meanwhile, be under no illusions. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has a price for his co-operation. Russia’s upper house of parliament, in an appeal this week for a coalition of states to combat terrorism, warned that such efforts are weakened by “unilateral sanctions” against Russia. The EU and US should make absolutely clear that Ukraine-related sanctions will be lifted only if Russia fulfils February’s Minsk ceasefire agreement.

The Kremlin’s real goals are even broader. Mr Putin has drawn parallels with the 9/11 attacks and his abortive attempts to create a partnership against terror with President George W Bush. An opportunity was missed then, he says, that should not be lost again.

Yet Mr Putin is not seeking to “join” the west. He wants to establish Russia as one of a handful of world powers, with their own zones of influence, that Moscow believes should dominate global affairs. The antiterrorism appeal from Russia’s upper house this week drew parallels with the fight against Nazism 70 years ago. Other senior Russian officials have called for a modern-day “anti-Hitler coalition”.

This is a coded reference to how the west and the Soviet Union put aside fundamental differences in values and worldview in the face of a common foe. Such parallels are disingenuous. Only by combining forces could the second world war allies defeat the existential threat of Nazism. For all its failures to date, it is not beyond the capabilities of the coalition already assembled to defeat Isis — without Russian help.

A result of the anti-Nazi alliance in Russian eyes, moreover, was the 1945 Yalta agreement — which Mr Putin has praised, most recently at the UN in September, as a kind of model. He suggested it had “saved the world from large-scale upheavals” after the war. The rest of Europe has a very different view: that Yalta condemned its eastern states to decades of Soviet occupation.

A common assault against Islamist terror may be possible; compromise by the west of its 21st-century values is not. There can be no return to the “great power” politics of an earlier era, with its territorial carve-ups and spheres of influence, to which Mr Putin evidently, and unsettlingly, aspires.

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