Photo by Alexei Druzhinin / RIA Novosti / Kremlin via Reuters
In the early hours of 8 December, as Syrian rebels swept towards Bashar al-Assad’s presidential palace in Damascus, an Ilyushin Il76 transport plane quietly departed the capital, veering northwest, before vanishing from the radar. Later that day, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that the Syrian dictator had arrived in Russia, where Vladimir Putin had granted him and his family asylum for “humanitarian reasons”. But the Russian leader was already attempting to distance himself from his long-time client. Peskov said Putin had no plans to meet with Assad and stressed that Russia was doing “everything that is possible” to reach the new Syrian leadership. By the following day the rebels’ flag was flying over the Syrian embassy in Moscow with the future of Russia’s prized foothold in the Middle East hanging in the balance.
The Kremlin’s relations with Damascus stretch back decades. Syria established diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union during Joseph Stalin’s rule in 1944, but the relationship deepened when Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, took power in 1971 and turned to Moscow for military equipment and economic support, granting the Soviet navy access to the port of Tartus in return. The Tartus naval base remains Russia’s only such facility outside the territory of the former Soviet Union and has long been cherished by Moscow for its strategically important location in the Mediterranean, where the Russian navy maintains a task force, and its warm waters, which allow for year-round access, unlike many other Russian facilities that can be hampered by sea ice during the winter months. The younger Assad signed a 49-year lease with Moscow for the Tartus base in 2017, allowing Russia to significantly expand the facility and use it, free of charge, until 2066.
This was not an act of charity on Assad’s behalf. Russia, under Putin, had emerged as one of the Syrian dictator’s most important backers, intervening on his behalf in the Syrian civil war in 2015, alongside Iran and its regional proxies, to save his murderous regime from impending defeat. Russia supplied overwhelming air power, operating from an airbase at Khmeimim in the coastal province of Latakia and repeatedly bombing rebel-held areas, including attacks on civilian infrastructure such as schools and hospitals. A triumphant Putin flew into the airbase in 2017 where he shook hands with Assad and declared “victory” in the conflict, claiming to have “saved [Syria] as a sovereign, independent state”. Assad vowed to “never forget” Russia’s actions and, as a token of his appreciation, signed another 49-year lease for the airbase, also free of charge, which has become a crucial logistics hub for Russian operations in Africa.
Putin’s military intervention in Syria served not only to shore up Assad’s regime and secure Moscow’s access to the country’s military facilities, but to reassert Russia’s claim to be a great power – refuting Barack Obama’s assertion the previous year that it was merely “a regional power”, which had annexed Crimea in 2014 out of “weakness”. Putin believed the tumultuous uprisings of the Arab Spring had been orchestrated, at least in part, by the West and was infuriated by the Nato-led intervention in Libya in 2011, which culminated in the gruesome death of Muammar Gaddafi at the hands of rebel forces. These events galvanised the Russian leader’s determination to push back against what he viewed as Western-led attempts at regime change and to re-establish Russia as a major force within global politics and a significant player in the Middle East.
Russia’s intervention in Syria stood in stark contrast to Obama’s failure to enforce America’s “red line” over Assad’s use of chemical weapons in 2013. Putin’s confidence was further boosted after Donald Trump’s victory in the US with his “America First” approach to foreign policy and efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, followed by Joe Biden’s shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
Putin’s hubris, and his obsession with subjugating Ukraine, plunged Russia (and Ukraine) into a years-long war and sealed Assad’s downfall. Confronted with the rapid advance of the reconstituted Syrian opposition led by the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), and the collapse of Assad’s own demoralised military, it became clear that, this time, neither Russia nor a weakened Iran and its seriously degraded proxies would be willing or able to come to the Syrian dictator’s rescue. It is difficult to argue that Russia should have fought harder to save Assad than his own forces, many of whom simply took off their uniforms and ran away, but in the end, Moscow offered Assad little more than asylum.
The abrupt demise of Assad’s regime is a significant loss for Russia, whose continued access to its military bases in Tartus and Khmeimim now depends on the benevolence of the Syrian rebel groups its forces previously bombed. Putin, never prone to sentimentality, is already shifting course. Having earlier described HTS as “terrorists” – as the US has – by 9 December the Russian foreign ministry was referring to the group as the “armed Syrian opposition” and making clear overtures to the incoming government. Kremlin-controlled media outlets, meanwhile, have featured harsh criticism of Assad, with the Syrian ambassador to Moscow, Bashar al-Jaafari, denouncing the former leader’s “shameful and humiliating escape” in an interview with RT Arabic, where he spoke of the “need for change” and “hope for a better future”. Russia clearly wants to hold on to its facilities in Syria, noted Dara Massicot, a military analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, on X, and has resources to offer such as “money, barter, oil/gas, limited mercenaries” in any forthcoming negotiations.
There are signs that this early outreach might be paying off. While Iran’s embassy in Damascus has been ransacked, the Russian embassy, so far, has not. Russia’s TASS news agency also claims that the Syrian opposition has guaranteed the security of its military facilities in the country, although the Russian navy appears to have moved its warships out of Tartus over the weekend in any case, with a small flotilla assuming a holding pattern out of mortar range off the Syrian coast. “Russia’s military presence in the Middle East region hangs by a thread,” acknowledged Rybar, a prominent Russian military blogger in a social media post on 8 December.
Still, this does not mean that all is now lost from the Kremlin’s perspective. Putin will seek to preserve his options for future negotiations, content to allow Assad to live, quietly, under his protection as he endeavours to retain what leverage he has, well aware of how rapidly the region’s past popular uprisings have descended into violence and renewed civil war. He will also be even more focused on his own regime security, having seen how quickly his Syrian counterpart’s grip on power evaporated. But above all else, Putin is likely to be even more determined to press ahead with his assault on Ukraine, where he believes his forces are now winning on the battlefield and a meaningful victory is finally within his grasp. “The special military operation is the absolute priority for our country,” said Peskov on 11 December, using the Kremlin’s term for the invasion of Ukraine, as he attempted to play down the consequences for Russia from Assad’s fall. As well as the extraordinary toll in casualties and the economic cost that war has wrought, Putin’s imperialist ambitions in Ukraine have also now endangered Russia’s military bases and its strategic position in the Middle East. The Russian president will want a significant prize to show for those sacrifices, and with the imminent return of Donald Trump to the White House, he may see his best opportunity in years to end the war – or at least agree a temporary halt to hostilities – on his terms.
Topics in this article : Bashar al-Assad, Russia, Syria, Vladimir Putin