As Obama Pauses Action, Putin Takes Center Stage.

MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin has been many things to President Obama: a partner at times, an irritant more often, the host of the elusive Edward J. Snowden and “the bored kid in the back of the classroom” who offered so little on the administration’s foreign policy goals that Mr. Obama canceled plans to hold a summit meeting in Moscow last week.       

Yet suddenly Mr. Putin has eclipsed Mr. Obama as the world leader driving the agenda in the Syria crisis. He is offering a potential, if still highly uncertain, alternative to what he has vocally criticized as America’s militarism and reasserted Russian interests in a region where it had been marginalized since the collapse of the Soviet Union.       

Although circumstances could shift yet again, Mr. Putin appears to have achieved several objectives, largely at Washington’s expense. He has handed a diplomatic lifeline to his longtime ally in Syria, President Bashar al-Assad, who not long ago appeared at risk of losing power and who President Obama twice said must step down. He has stopped Mr. Obama from going around the United Nations Security Council, where Russia holds a veto, to assert American priorities unilaterally.

More generally, Russia has at least for now made itself indispensable in containing the conflict in Syria, which Mr. Putin has argued could ignite Islamic unrest around the region, even as far as Russia’s own restive Muslim regions, if it is mismanaged. He has boxed Mr. Obama into treating Moscow as an essential partner for much of the next year, if Pentagon estimates of the time it will take to secure Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile are accurate.

“Putin probably had his best day as president in years yesterday,” Ian Bremmer, the president of Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, said in a conference call on Wednesday, “and I suspect he’s enjoying himself right now.”

In an Op-Ed article in The New York Times released on Wednesday, Mr. Putin laid down a strong challenge to Mr. Obama’s vision of how to address the turmoil, arguing that a military strike risked “spreading the conflict far beyond Syria’s borders” and would violate international law, undermining postwar stability.

“It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States,” Mr. Putin wrote. “Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it.”

When Mr. Putin returned to the presidency a year ago, he moved aggressively to stamp out a growing protest movement and silence competing and independent voices. He shored up his position at home but, as his government promoted nationalism with a hostile edge, passed antigay legislation, locked up illegal immigrants in a city camp, kept providing arms to the Syrian government and ultimately gave refuge to the leaker Mr. Snowden, Mr. Putin was increasingly seen in the West as a calloused, out-of-touch modern-day czar.

Now he appears to be relishing a role as a statesman. His spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said in an interview that the Russian president was not seeking “ownership of the initiative,” but wanted only to promote a political solution to head off a wider military conflict in the Middle East.

“It’s only the beginning of the road,” Mr. Peskov said, “but it’s a very important beginning.”

To get started, Mr. Putin sent his foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, to Geneva on Thursday to meet with Secretary of State John Kerry, in hopes of hammering out the myriad logistical details of putting a sprawling network of chemical sites under international control in the middle of a deadly civil war.

Even that step was another indication of just how much the circumstances have changed in such a short time. Only a week ago, Mr. Putin was accusing Mr. Kerry of lying to Congress about the presence of militants allied with Al Qaeda in Syria. “He’s lying,” he said in televised remarks. “And he knows he’s lying. It’s sad.”

On Wednesday, when Russia submitted a package of proposals to the Americans and others ahead of that meeting in Geneva, Mr. Peskov again used the opportunity to try to paint Russia as the peacemaker to the United States’ war maker. Mr. Peskov declined to release details of the plan, other than to say Russia’s most important condition was that Syria’s willingness to give up its weapons could only be tested if the United States refrained from the retaliation Mr. Obama has threatened. “Any strike will make this impossible,” Mr. Peskov said.

The New York times, reports.