Moscow is trying to secure the future of its key military bases in Syria while initiating contacts with the country’s new rebel leaders. The dramatic collapse of the Assad regime threatens to erode Russia’s influence in the Middle East.
Russia maintains a major air base in northwestern Syria and a naval facility in the Mediterranean port of Tartus since Moscow’s military intervention helped President Bashar al-Assad recapture most of the country after nationwide protests that began in 2011.
Following the collapse of Assad, the Kremlin’s staunchest ally in the Middle East who has fled to Moscow, Russia appears to be turning to diplomacy to preserve its influence in Syria, increasing its activity with rebels it had labeled terrorists only days earlier. .
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the press that Russian authorities are taking all “necessary measures to establish contact in Syria with those capable of guaranteeing the security of military bases.”
Earlier, a Kremlin source had told Russian state media that Syrian opposition leaders had agreed to guarantee the security of Russian bases and diplomatic institutions in Syria.
The two bases are of enormous importance to Russia: the Tartus facility gives Vladimir Putin access to a warm-water port, while Moscow has used the Khmeimim air base as a staging point for its military contractors in and out of Africa. .
The key question now, observers say, is whether Russia can reach an agreement with Syria’s new leaders to retain its bases.
“My guess is that Russia wants to keep the bases if it can do so through negotiations,” says Dara Massicot, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “They can offer resources: money, barter, oil and gas, limited mercenaries. What matters is whether the Syrian coalition will accept anything from them.”
Massicot says that on Monday most of Russia’s military assets remained at the two bases. “If evacuation occurs, it will be obvious.”
The Kremlin has offered little information about the future of the bases, saying it is too early to determine what lies ahead for its military presence in Syria.
Behind the scenes, however, Russian officials appear to have launched an outreach campaign aimed at the leaders who overthrew Assad.
In the past 24 hours, Moscow and its state-controlled media have noticeably softened their rhetoric toward the Islamist group HTS, which led the stunning offensive against Assad that caught much of the world by surprise.
RIA Novosti and Tass, the two main Russian news agencies, have gone from calling HTS “terrorists” to describing them as “armed opposition.”
The contrast is telling: Just a few days earlier, during a press conference in Doha, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, visibly angry, stressed that HTS was a Western-backed terrorist organization that “should not be allowed to seize land in Syria.”
In another sign of Russia’s willingness to collaborate with the new leaders in Damascus, the Syrian embassy in Moscow raised the three-star flag of Syrian rebel groups on Monday morning.
The Syrian ambassador in Moscow harshly criticized Assad in an interview with the Russian state channel RT. “The escape of the head of this system in such a miserable and humiliating manner confirms the correctness of the change and brings hope for a new dawn,” he said.
The Syrian embassy also said it was “waiting for instructions from representatives of the new leadership,” the embassy told Tass.
Russia’s change of attitude appears to have borne its first fruits. Unlike Iran, whose embassy was looted in Damascus, the one in Moscow has remained intact. Tass, citing Syrian sources, also reported that the opposition “had no plans to penetrate” the two Russian military bases.
Observers suggested that Moscow could adopt a strategy in Syria similar to its approach with the Taliban, designated a terrorist organization since 2003 but subsequently courted by the Kremlin after seizing power in Afghanistan in 2021.
“Moscow prefers to deal with those who have power and control, [y] it discards those who lose it,” says Nikolai Sokov, a former Russian and Soviet diplomat who is a senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Nonproliferation.
This leaves Assad in a position of irrelevance in the Russian capital, having outlived his usefulness to Putin.
Although the Kremlin claimed that Assad’s evacuation to Moscow was Putin’s personal decision, Peskov stressed that the Russian leader was not planning to hold a public meeting.
In fleeing to Moscow, Assad follows the path of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled Ukraine for Russia in 2014 after weeks of street protests that culminated in a bloody crackdown.
Ironically, Assad once tried to reassure the Kremlin that he was not like Yanukovych, asking a Russian official in 2014 to convey the message: “Tell Putin that I am not Yanukovych and I will not leave.”
It is widely believed that the Kremlin views Yanukovych as a weak leader who failed to quell the unrest quickly enough. Early reports from Russian-aligned media outlets and pro-war bloggers suggest that Moscow also places much of the blame for the regime’s fall on Assad.
“Bashar al-Assad cowardly fled the country, abandoning everyone and everything… Even Saddam Hussein had the courage, when everything was over, to address the nation,” he wrote on X Rybar, a popular account linked to the Russian Defense Ministry. .
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