Over the past three days, since ousted Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad arrived in Moscow, there has been a steady drip of news tidbits and official Russian statements. Disappointingly minimal in their sparse content and neutral language, they project a Kremlin keen to keep the precise whereabouts of Assad and his family under wraps. We are yet to see any pictures of the Assads, or glean details of what sort of life they can expect in the Russian capital.
Russian President Vladimir Putin granted Assad political asylum, the Kremlin spokesperson nonchalantly told reporters, adding that there are no plans for the two men to meet. “He is secured,” added Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov. “Everyone knows that [Putin] always protects his friends and acquaintances,” explained senior lawmaker Alexei Chepa. “Russia never abandons its own.”
At least two state-run news outlets shared photo compilations of the Assad family over the years, mostly of the dictator with his wife Asma, the two beaming at official state functions. According to a widely read Telegram channel believed to have ties to Russian security agencies, the Assads fled Syria for Moscow with their band of translators, drivers and security guards. They join other members of the extended Assad family including Bashar’s cousin Hafez Makhlouf, who reportedly owns a 3,000-square-foot apartment in the city center, the VChK-OGPU channel reported.
So far, so anodyne. (Unless you look at key Putin ally and Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, who told state media, “Assad is a doctor, not a dictator! He never killed anyone.”)
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by the Kremlin’s cautious refusal to condone or condemn Assad; few things are more important to Putin than saving face. Moscow had propped up Assad’s brutal regime since 2015, when Russia decisively intervened in the Syrian civil war and turned the tide in its favor. The support was a source of enormous pride for the Kremlin, serving as a cornerstone of its image as a global power as well as sending a stark message to the West that Russia was, once again, the guarantor of stability in regions of geopolitical importance.
Shortly after Moscow intervened with its firepower, sending Russian bomber jets into the sky from its newly built Khmeimim airbase in Latakia, the propaganda that Russia does so well started to pop up around Moscow, a city where I was living at the time. I watched as my local square was turned into an open-air photography exhibit showing the people of Aleppo — not war-weary and traumatized as the West saw them — but jolly, well-nourished and grateful to the Russian soldiers coming to their rescue.
After Palmyra was recaptured by Russian-backed Syrian forces a year later, the Kremlin sent its favorite conductor, Valery Gergiev, to perform Prokofiev and Bach with a St. Petersburg orchestra. Squinting under a bright sun, they played to an audience of Russian and Syrian soldiers in the city’s Roman amphitheater where the Islamic State group had executed the regime’s soldiers. Even Russian video games were created that projected the message that only the Kremlin could save Syria. The curators at the lavish Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, once the seat of Catherine the Great, rooted around the basement to bring out their Syrian antiquities — Roman-era busts and 2,500-year-old glassware. Much fuss was made of the Russian empress’s admiration of the third-century Palmyrian Queen Zenobia, whom Catherine had allegedly fashioned herself after. When Assad called Putin “the only defender of Christian civilization,” work soon began by Russian groups to restore Syrian churches. As recently as July last year, the Hermitage held a press conference updating the public on the Russian state’s ongoing work on the restoration of the Arch of Triumph in Palmyra.
Moscow finds itself in an awkward position, striving to curtail reputational damage while already making inroads with the Syrian rebels who ousted the despised Assads, who are now living under its roof. Russia will want to retain access to its Mediterranean naval base in Tartus, established during Soviet rule in the early 1970s, a goal that may be untenable for now. Satellite imagery shows that Russian warships have left the port and are anchored out at sea. Tartus has long served as the Russian Navy’s key logistical support in the Mediterranean, allowing ships to resupply and undergo maintenance without returning to the Black Sea. Without it, Moscow will be hard-pressed to continue its military and commercial activities across the African continent.
Russia’s influential pro-war military bloggers were largely outraged by the fall of the Syrian regime and the rapid emptying of Russian bases there, castigating the Kremlin for such humiliation. “The death of all the good Russian people who died in Syria was in vain,” wrote Rybar, one of the most popular channels, referring to the more than 540 Russian soldiers and private military contractors who were killed in Syria between 2015 and 2024, according to BBC Russia.
It is now abundantly clear that Moscow will not be backing Assad again anytime soon. On Saturday, state media, which is often a perfunctory mouthpiece for the Kremlin, closed its evening broadcasts by calling the opposition “terrorists”; by Sunday morning, as news of the fall of Damascus spread, the same broadcasters called them “armed groups” who were also quite progressive, explaining how they had lifted the ban on women wearing headscarves. The Syrian embassy in Moscow changed its flag from the regime to that of the opposition to applause and dancing from members of the Syrian diaspora who had gathered to watch under a soft snowfall.
On Monday evening’s broadcast on state-owned Channel One, Russian foreign policy had not only done an about-face but was rewriting its own history. “I want to remind you that Russia has always believed, it has always believed — this is not the position of the last couple of days — that it is the Syrians who should determine the future and form of their country,” talk show host Anatoly Kuzichev said as scenes of jubilation from Syrian streets played in the background.
Assad now joins a motley crew of exiles in Russia including Serbian war criminals, American whistleblower Edward Snowden and the chauvinist French actor Gerard Depardieu. But unlike most of them, who have received either temporary asylum or Russian citizenship, he is the first person to be granted political asylum in Russia in 32 years (the last people to receive that honor were Azerbaijani president Ayaz Mutallibov and a North Korean defector).
A decade ago, in the months leading up to the Russian intervention in the war in Syria, Assad made Putin a promise. On a visit to Moscow, he compared himself to ousted Ukrainian President Vladimir Yanukovych, who had recently fled Kyiv for the safety of Russia during the pro-European revolution. “I am not Yanukovych,” Assad said. “I am not going anywhere.” In the end, as with his promises to protect Syrian minorities or bring about reform, Assad didn’t keep his word.
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