Syrian overthrow is bad news for Russia
Losing Russian bases in Syria could threaten Putin in Ukraine.
Sunday, 08 December 2024
Russia said on Sunday that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had left office and departed his country after giving orders for a peaceful transfer of power, but did not say where he was now or whether the Russian military planned to stay in Syria.
Islamist rebels declared they had ousted Assad after seizing control of Damascus on Sunday, ending his family’s decades of autocratic rule after more than 13 years of civil war.
Assad flew out of Damascus for an unknown destination earlier on Sunday, two senior army officers told Reuters. His current whereabouts were unknown.
“As a result of negotiations between B. Assad and a number of participants in the armed conflict on the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic, he decided to resign from the presidency and left the country, giving instructions for a peaceful transfer of power,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
“Russia did not participate in these negotiations.”
There were unconfirmed media reports that Assad had been visiting Moscow, where his elder son studied, when rebels reached Aleppo late last month, before returning to Syria. The Kremlin declined to comment on the matter at the time and it is unclear whether Russia has offered him refuge now.
Moscow, a staunch backer of Assad whom it intervened to help in 2015 in its biggest Middle East foray since the Soviet collapse, is scrambling to salvage its position with its geopolitical clout in the wider region and two strategically-important military bases in Syria on the line.
Military bases
The Kremlin, which convened a conference call with reporters on Sunday to set out its response to a call by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump for immediate talks on Ukraine, made no comment on the unfolding situation in Syria, saying its stance had been set out in the foreign ministry statement.
The ministry’s statement said Russia’s two military facilities in Syria had been put on a state of high alert, but played down an immediate risk to them.
“There is currently no serious threat to their security,” the ministry said.
Russia operates the Hmeimim air base in Syria’s Latakia province which it has used to launch airstrikes against rebels in the past, and has a naval facility at Tartous on the coast.
The Tartous facility is Russia’s only Mediterranean repair and replenishment hub, and Moscow has used Syria as a staging post to fly its military contractors in and out of Africa.
Losing Tartous in particular would be a serious blow to Russia’s ability to project power in the Middle East, the Mediterranean and Africa, say Western military analysts.
Russian war bloggers, some of whom are close to the Russian Defence Ministry and get more freedom from Russian authorities to speak out than military officials, have warned that the bases are now dangerously exposed regardless of what Moscow says officially.
The Foreign Ministry said Moscow was alarmed by events in Syria.
“We urge all parties involved to refrain from the use of violence and to resolve all issues of governance through political means,” its statement said.
“In that regard, the Russian Federation is in contact with all groups of the Syrian opposition.”
It said it was also doing all it could to ensure the safety of Russian citizens in Syria, whom the embassy on Friday advised to leave the country. The Russian Embassy in Damascus told the state TASS news agency on Sunday that its staff were “fine.”
Rebels’ success in Syria is a humiliation for Putin
Russian fighter jets were quickly deployed to launch airstrikes against the rebel groups who rose up from northwest Syria a little more than a week ago.
But as the rebels swept into Damascus on Sunday morning, the skies across Syria were clear but for a private jet thought to be carrying the president.
The Kremlin, it appears, had no plan to save Bashar al-Assad once his soldiers melted away. Instead, it has been quietly withdrawing its own forces from Syria.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, alongside Iran, had been Assad’s biggest backer, effectively turning Syria into a Russian vassal state.
Only in July, Putin had welcomed Assad to the Kremlin saying that he was “delighted” to host his guest, considered a global pariah for slaughtering thousands of men, women and children.
The two men shook hands and smiled warmly at each other with Putin clearly enjoying Assad acting as the servile regional leader who had come to pay his respects.
Putin came to Assad’s rescue in 2015, first launching massive air strikes against rebels, then sending Wagner mercenaries to back up Assad’s military and finally ordering regular Russian soldiers to deploy to Syria.
But with the rebel’s lightning-fast capture of Aleppo, Hama, Homs and now Damascus in the past couple of weeks and the collapse of Assad’s army, the Kremlin appears to have decided that it had seen enough.
Various think tanks have estimated that Putin has been spending £2 million every day keeping his military in Syria. Several hundred Russian mercenaries and soldiers have also been killed in Syria but the war in Ukraine is now Putin’s priority and he may have ordered that not a single missile or warplane could be spared to defend Assad.
Donald Trump, the in-coming US president, appeared to catch the sentiment of the Kremlin’s shifting strategy towards Syria when he wrote in a Tweet that Assad’s “protector, Russia, Russia, Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, was not interested in protecting him any longer”.
Kremin propagandists have appeared stunned but determined to shape the narrative around the collapse of Assad’s regime.
And this was critical for Putin’s plans in Africa. From Tartus, he could supply his forces in Libya and West Africa, where Russia has been challenging the West, with weapons and other kit.
Mark Galeotti, an honorary professor of Russian studies at UCL, said on his weekly podcast ‘In Moscow’s Shadows’ that abandoning the Tartus naval base would have “serious knock-on effects” for Russia’s operations in Africa.
And the collapse of the Assad regime may also have deeper implications.
Prof Galeotti said that the Russian system was far more inflexible now than it was before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, more vulnerable to hard-to-predict “black swan events”.
“What we are seeing in Syria is absolutely the flapping of the black swan’s wings,” he said.
This is a sentiment already being picked up by Ukrainian commentators. They used the collapse of the Assad regime to mock Putin.
Kira Rudik, a Ukrainian MP, said: “First, regimes fall very slowly, and nobody believes they are collapsing. And then, regimes fall fast.”
But analysts also warned that the shock of the rapid collapse of Assad’s regime may also impact the prospects for peace in Ukraine.
Encouraged by Mr Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky has said that a negotiated deal with Russia may be the best way to end the war, but the collapse of Assad’s regime may harden Putin’s still-uncompromising position.
Tatiana Stanovaya, a Russia analyst, said that Putin had been “shaken” by the collapse of Assad and would now be less inclined to “demonstrate flexibility” in Ukraine.
“The war in Ukraine has, to some extent, cost him Syria,” she said.