Eurasia Press & News
Analysis: As the post-Assad era in Syria beckons, Russia faces a massive loss of prestige in the Middle East.
On 8 December, Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad fell from power after a rapid-fire offensive led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) rebel group. While Assad’s ouster was widely celebrated in Syria and across the Arab world, the mood in Moscow was much less sanguine.
A Russian Foreign Ministry statement released shortly after Assad’s arrival in Moscow as a political asylum seeker expressed “extreme concern” about the events in Syria and declared that Russia’s military bases in Syria were on “high alert”.
Less than twenty-four hours before Assad’s demise, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov castigated HTS as “terrorists” and declared that it was inadmissible for such a rebel group to take over Syrian territory.
Although Russia had expressed solidarity with Assad from the first moments of the Syrian civil war’s outbreak in 2011 and intervened militarily on his behalf in 2015, the Kremlin did not deploy resources to prevent his overthrow.
As the post-Assad era beckons, Russia faces the loss of its Tartus naval base and Khmeimim airbase in Syria, and a massive loss of prestige in the Middle East. This erosion of status could implore Russia to attempt to pragmatically engage with Syria’s new authorities, even though their willingness to cooperate with Moscow is highly uncertain.
Why Russia stood by as Assad fell from power
As HTS forces embarked on their lightning blitz on Damascus, Russia continued to militarily support Assad. During his 7 December Doha Forum address, Lavrov insisted that Russia’s Aerospace Forces in Khmeimim were helping the Syrian Arab Army to “repel terrorist attacks”. Lavrov’s statement could be substantiated by the wave of aerial assaults by Russian and Syrian forces on Aleppo and Idlib.
Yet the scale of Russia’s military assistance paled considerably when compared to its successful intervention in 2015. The limited scope of Russia’s commitment to Assad in his final days can be attributed to two key factors.
The first was the surprise element inherent in HTS’s offensive. After Assad’s fall, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declared “What happened in general probably surprised the whole world and we are no exception in this case”. Peskov’s statement reflected the popular view in Moscow that Assad’s return to the Arab League in May 2023 marked the end of major threats to his regime.
As the Syrian opposition groups were isolated from their Arab partners, the Kremlin was confident that rebel forces would not have sufficient capabilities to launch a large-scale offensive against Assad.
This over-confidence caused Russia to downplay the escalation of military clashes in Idlib and HTS’s stealth military build-up around Aleppo. Instead of redeploying forces to defend these areas against a HTS offensive, Russia chose to set up nine observation posts near the Syrian Golan Heights to guard against Israeli incursions.
It was a strategic blunder that compounded Israel’s degradation of Hezbollah and Iran-aligned militias and left Assad’s forces exposed around HTS’s core axes of advance.
The second was Russia’s drawdown of military assets from Syria to Ukraine and the decline of its ability to project hard power in multiple theatres. In August 2022, Russia removed S-300 air defence missiles from Masyaf, Syria to the Black Sea port of Novorossiyk. The number of Russian military sites in Syria declined from 132 to 105 in 2023 before experiencing a modest uptick to 114 in 2024.
Staffing of these facilities became an issue of concern as the June 2023 Wagner Group mutiny resulted in personnel expulsions that were not fully replaced. By the time of the HTS offensive, Russia’s only viable option was to redeploy Africa Corps mercenaries to Syria, which would be a time-consuming process.
Russian media outlets have made a rare admission of their country’s resource limitations in recent days. A 2 December Nezavisimaya Gazeta editorial conceded, “The previous free resources are obviously gone – now Russia itself needs them elsewhere. Continuing a special military operation in Donbas in Novorossiya, liberating the Kursk region, and carrying out massive strikes on targets in Ukraine, Russia can hardly participate in another conflict with a high degree of involvement.”
After Assad’s demise, Russian military analyst Ruslan Pukhov admitted that Russia lacks the capability for meaningful hard power projection outside of its self-professed sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space. The calculation that inaction would be a lesser evil than a botched intervention likely convinced Russia to stay put.
A devastating blow to Russia’s prestige
Assad’s stunning demise has left Russia’s great power status in the Mediterranean in tatters. Due to the closure of the Bosphorus Strait and evacuation of naval assets from Tartus, Russia lacks the ability to carry out large-scale maritime operations in the Mediterranean.
Unless a swift agreement can be reached with Khalifa Haftar’s Libya National Army (LNA) on a facility in eastern Libya, Russia will likely suffer long-term isolation from the Mediterranean and experience severe logistical disruptions to its operations in Mali, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, and Sudan.
Nikolay Sukhov, a prominent Middle East expert at the IMEMO RAS think tank in Moscow, described Syria as a “jump-off point to Africa” and warned that Russian fighter jets could no longer make direct flights to African theatres.
Russia’s meek response to the HTS offensive will also shatter the illusion of strength fostered by its first military intervention in Syria. Russia surged ahead of the US as a desired external partner amongst Arab millennials in the 2018 Arab Youth Survey. The main driver of this shift was Russia’s decisive intervention on Assad’s behalf in Syria, which reinforced Moscow’s image as a loyal ally in a time of crisis.
This notion of Russian power appealed even to Arab youths who were deeply opposed to Assad’s rule in Syria. As Russia also promoted the “Syrian model” of counterinsurgency to clients in Sub-Saharan Africa, a key component of its messaging needs to be reworked.
Turkey’s support for HTS’s overthrow of Assad could also strain relations between Moscow and Ankara. Fascist philosopher Alexander Dugin responded to Assad’s fall with the following warning shot to Turkey: “Russia will not do Turkey any harm. For sure. But after such betrayal it is hard to hope that Russia will come to help Turkey in the case of trouble.”
As Turkey is a key lifeline for Russia’s evasion of Western sanctions, a crisis in relations over Syria could have far-reaching economic impacts for Moscow.
Russia’s potential engagement with Syria’s new authorities
After Assad’s ouster, Chairman of the State Duma Defence Committee Andrei Kartapolov confirmed that the Russian Embassy in Damascus had established lines of communication with HTS. Peskov seconded Kartapolov’s comments by highlighting the importance of dialogue for the preservation of Russia’s bases in Syria. A stark contrast to Russian media commentaries, which depicted HTS’s rise as the product of NATO proxy warfare against the Syrian state.
Russia’s dialogue with HTS mirrors its outreaches to Muslim Brotherhood Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi in 2012 and growing cooperation with the Taliban since it retook power in Afghanistan in 2021. These engagements were not thwarted by Russia’s designation of the Muslim Brotherhood and Taliban as terrorist groups. Russia also has used the Astana negotiations format to engage with Syrian opposition figures, such as Jaish al-Islam’s Mohammed Alloushand Fastaqim’s Zakaria Malahifji.
For substantive engagement with the HTS to transpire over its military bases, Russia will almost certainly have to assist efforts to de-list the group as a UN-designated terror organisation.
UN Special Envoy to Syria Geir Pedersen has dangled this prospect provided that HTS governs Syria in a more pluralistic fashion than it has done in Idlib. Despite its visceral disdain for Russian war crimes in Syria, Russia’s UN Security Council permanent membership means that HTS will have to engage with it to get de-listed.
The rapid collapse of Assad’s regime humiliated Russia at a time when it is trying to project strength ahead of potential negotiations over Ukraine. HTS now holds the key to the preservation of Russian great power status in the Middle East.
