"There Was No Time For Syria"

 "Syria is their only real foothold in the Middle East and the Mediterranean."

"[The rebel victory has become] part of the price they are paying for the war in Ukraine."

"What good is Russia as a partner if it cannot save its oldest client in the Middle East from a ragtag band of militias?

"Besides the operational setback, it is also a diplomatic and reputational blow."

Eugene Rumer, director, Russia and Eurasia Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington

Russian President Vladimir Putin appears on a screen of the stage as he attends a rally marking the 10th anniversary of Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, in Red Square in central Moscow on March 18.

 

With the declaration that Moscow had accomplished its mission in the civil war that Syria's Alawite Shia-minority ruler was on the cusp of losing to the opposing majority Sunni Syrians, contesting Bashir al-Assad's corrupt rule that had punished and persecuted his Sunni subjects for decades, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed his Russian troops at the Russian air base in Syria, pledging that Russia was there in Syria to stay. "If the terrorists raise their heads again, we will deal unprecedented strikes unlike anything they have seen."

There was no compunction for the Kremlin in joining a civil war where the Syrian regime had been using chemical weapons on its own people. Where barrel bombs exacted their body-blasting destruction on civilians. Where four hundred thousand Syrians had died in Bashir al-Assad's vengeance conflict against his Syrian subjects who had, in 2011 merely objected to the unequal treatment they habitually were meted out, from a government favouring the minority Alawites. 

Russian warplanes were put to action, becoming in effect Syria's punishing squad of bombers targeting schools, markets, clinics and hospitals in Sunni-majority areas of the fractured country. The tide that had turned against Assad turned around to favour the regime while the civil war was placed on the back burner to a slow simmer. Until the rebel militias that Vladimir Putin and Bashar Assad called terrorists suddenly struck and in a lightning-fast ten days took Syria's major cities and routed its president.

In the process, Vladimir Putin's aspirations for a solid footing in the Middle East as a big-time player taking the place of the  recessive United States, suffered an unexpected geopolitical setback; foreseeable in fact, given Russia's military checkmate in Ukraine. "Our involvement over there had a cost", Anton Mardasov, Moscow-based analyst, stated. Russia's preeminent place in the region has experienced a landslide of ignominious dimensions. Russian foreign ministry's acknowledgement came in the form of "extreme concern" about "the dramatic events".

Analysts are waiting to see whether Moscow's attempts to reach an agreement with the new government in Syria, once terrorists, now a government, will allow them to retain the Tartus naval base and Hmeimim airbase, the very stage of Mr. Putin's 2017 victory speech. An agreement sought from the terrorists whom Russian warplanes had been bombing on behest of the now-deposed Syrian regime from 2015 forward. Russia's nightmare of seeing itself as a world power off-track suddenly.

Strutting on the world stage in Russia's resurgence, suddenly its bloody airstrikes that bombed opposition groups into submission appears to have gone badly amiss; that message that Russia would use overwhelming force to support its allies and assert its own interests fallen flat. The Syrian bases that Russia held in its alliance with Syria allowed it to compete for influence in Libya, Mali and the Central African Republic. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 the Kremlin priority list was reoriented.

Commanders who had failed to distinguish themselves in Ukraine were latterly sent to Ukraine which turned into a "resort destination" for Russian servicemen escaping the carnage of battlefields in Ukraine. Underperforming generals were sent from Ukraine to service in Syria as a "kind of exile". "The priorities totally changed", Russian journalist Denis Korotkov stated. "There was no time for Syria". Russian planes and warships dispatched to the Ukraine conflict were unavailable for service in Syria.

A Russian soldier stands between portraits of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (right) and Russian President Vladimir Putin at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Damascus in 2018.