Since September 2015, Russia has intervened in Syria's civil war on behalf of its longtime ally Bashar al-Assad, and this film traces what that campaign reveals about Vladimir Putin's broader foreign policy. Journalist and director Édith Bouvier travels to Russia, Syria, Europe, and the United States, interviewing officials, military analysts, and witnesses to piece together a decade of escalation. The film revisits the 2013 chemical weapons attack and Obama's unenforced "red line," the annexation of Crimea six months later, and the deployment of the Wagner Group alongside Syrian troops near NATO's borders. It argues Syria became a testing ground for Russian weapons systems and a rehearsal for the tactics later used in Ukraine, while Western governments repeatedly declined to respond. The account closes with the collapse of the Assad regime in December 2024 after 54 years in power, and the discovery of torture prisons that held hundreds of thousands of the disappeared. A clear, reported look at how inaction abroad can embolden a state at home.