article: This was the question posed in the final moments of this year's Munich Security Forum by its chairman, Wolfgang Ischinger. This year's Forum was all about war and peace and, like the famed Tolstoy novel, all about Russia. Its principal setting is the divided and devastated Syrian city of Aleppo where Russia's intensive bombing is tilting the balance of power towards the Syrian military as it moves to encircle the rebel-held east. Tens of thousands of Syrians, desperate to escape the frightening violence, have already fled towards the Turkish border. No-one can be sure how this story will end. But Western and Arab backers of the Syrian opposition are alarmed and angry as the plot unfolds. A crucial meeting, which brought together all the outside players in Syria's tangled conflict on the eve of the Forum, cast a long shadow over the three-day annual gathering, which usually focuses on trans-Atlantic relationships. Many kept discussing how Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was able to emerge from five hours of difficult talks last Thursday without yielding to demands to stop the Aleppo bombing. Moscow is accused of mainly striking Western-backed opposition forces rather than terrorist groups including so-called Islamic State. Sources say Russia's top diplomat argued that if other groups fighting alongside the extremists ended up in the bombers' sights, that wasn't Russia's problem. Sixteen Arab and Western foreign ministers as well as international organisations sat around that table last Thursday. They clinched what was, on paper, an ambitious agreement: a cessation of hostilities within a week, the delivery of urgently needed aid to besieged areas within days, and a call to return to peace talks that had broken down last month in Geneva. But, no sooner was it hailed as a breakthrough, came the realisation that Russia's military campaign around Aleppo and other strategic areas would remain. "How were the Russians allowed to do that?" a European defence minister fumed in the corridors of the elegant Bayerischer Hof hotel, which was fizzing with fury over Moscow's manoeuvres. "Foreign ministers deal with words but we deal with the military consequences," he told me in a not so subtle jab. Since the meeting, at least three hospitals and two schools in northern Syria have been hit in missile strikes, killing scores of people - attacks condemned by France and Turkey as war crimes. Russia has said it "categorically rejects" accusations of war crimes over the bombing of hospitals. "The Russians have all the cards," a Western defence official explained with a resigned nod to the Russians' expanding military presence in Syria since they unleashed their bombing last September and turned the tide of war in President Bashar al-Assad's favour. Another observer spelt it out. "In the space of just four months Russia went from nothing in the past 25 years to being the key player in Middle East power politics with military capabilities and the political will to back it up," explained a senior European diplomat attending the Forum. "Gulf Arab states look at their allies and bemoan the fact that they don't deploy the
summary: "Is the message from Munich a message of continued fighting, or are we going to be capable, in the course of this year, of giving peace a chance?"