Russia’s increasing visibility in Middle Eastern affairs is primarily associated with its involvement in the Syrian conflict since October 2015. At the same time, Moscow’s role in the other two central regional crises — the Libyan one and the Yemeni one — has been much more restrained. It can be argued that across the three pure forms of involvement — 1) as a secondary warring party, 2) as a secondary supporting party, and 3) as a third party — Russia’s role in Syria included all of these forms, whereas in Libya only the two latter forms and in Yemen only as a third party. Pundits tend to reduce the explanation of these variations to interpreting diverging interests of Moscow in each of these conflicts. However, comparative study of the three cases based on contemporary theoretical approaches that address internationalization of intrastate armed conflicts offers ground to hypothesize that overlap between motivations and opportunities can serve as a more adequate conceptual framework in explaining these variations in Russia’s Middle Eastern policy.