They can play both sides all they want, syria matters more to russia than it matters for syrians, that's the irony here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93Syria_relations Russia's only Mediterranean naval base for its Black Sea Fleet is located in the Syrian port of Tartus.[2] It's of vital importance not just for the military, but also for commerce And jews ditched the oblast under stalin to jump on the zionist bandwagon, hence the great purge, stalin view this as treason and you know who stalin was, I don't need to make a drawing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin_and_antisemitism#Establishment_of_Jewish_Autonomous_Oblast To offset the growing Jewish national and religious aspirations of Zionism and to successfully categorize Soviet Jews under Stalin's nationality policy, an alternative to the Land of Israel was established with the help of Komzet and OZET in 1928. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast with the center in Birobidzhan in the Russian Far East was to become a "Soviet Zion". Yiddish, rather than "reactionary" Hebrew, would be the national language, and proletarian socialist literature and arts would replace Judaism as the quintessence of culture. Despite a massive domestic and international state propaganda campaign, the Jewish population there never reached 30% (as of 2003 it was only about 1.2%). The experiment ground to a halt in the mid-1930s, during Stalin's first campaign of purges, as local leaders were not spared during the purges.