Nine years ago, a caravan of hulking military cargo planes and aging naval ships began shuttling back and forth from Russian bases depositing a massive expeditionary military force to western Syria, cementing Russia's muscular presence in the Middle East and ultimately saving the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Assad is now gone, the fate of those bases are now jeopardy, and the question of Russia's entire Middle East strategy is now very much up in the air.
The fall of the Assad regime this past weekend was a tectonic event, reverberating across the entire Middle East and further. The Kremlin's 2015 Syria intervention, which scrambled the regional calculus, is now being scrambled yet again as Moscow tries to figure out what to do next.
As of December 9, there were no confirmed signs of any Russian pullout from Syria. An unnamed Kremlin official told the TASS state news agency that Russia had reached an agreement to ensure the safety of its military assets in Syria. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment to reporters.
"It's still premature to discuss this," he told reporters. "However, this will be a topic for discussion with whomever will be in charge in Syria in the future."
Here's what you need to know about Russia's presence in Syria, and what might come next.
What, Where, And Who
Russia's presence with Syria dates back to Soviet relations with Assad's father, and resulted in a critical asset for Moscow in 1971: naval access to the deep-water Mediterranean port at Tartus. Moscow's attention waned until 2011, when a popular uprising morphed into outright civil war threatening Assad's government.
In September 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered Russia's largest expeditionary force in decades, if ever, to deploy to Syria to bolster Assad's sputtering efforts to battle rebels and extremist groups. Syria granted Russia a 49-year lease access to Tartus and the air base at Hmeimim.
"The situation was very difficult, both in terms of morale and exhaustion," General Valery Gerasimov, the chairman of Russia's General Staff, said in an interview published in 2017. "A lack of ammunition, necessary types of support, command. Our operation began, and after some time we saw the first successes…. Today the Syrian Army is capable of performing tasks to protect its territory."
The following year, after months of relentless air strikes that obliterated cities -- a campaign so ruthless that the commander who ordered it was given the nickname "General Armageddon" -- Syria's military had the upper hand. Emboldened Russian forces, whose numbers also included private Wagner Group mercenaries, clashed with U.S.-backed forces in eastern Syria in 2018.
At the peak of Russia's intervention in Syria, around 2017, as many as 6,000 combat and auxiliary troops were deployed, including mercenary forces, according to estimates by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
Most of those ground forces were employed to advise Syria's military, but commanders also deployed Russian artillery and armored units, as well as special forces, to support Syrian infantry, particularly in 2016 during the offensive to retake Aleppo, Syria's largest city.
It's unclear how big the current Russian contingent on the ground is. The Telegram channel YeZh estimated 7,000 troops remained in the country.
Whither The Warm-Water Port
Tartus was a springboard for Russia to project power, not only in Syria throughout the Middle East but into Africa and elsewhere. After 2015, Russia used its Baltic and Black Sea ships extensively to supply the port and transport heavy weaponry and construction equipment. A construction company linked to a Kremlin-allied businessman was awarded a contract in 2019 to manage and expand the port.
The port's mooring capacity is as many as 11 vessels, including nuclear-powered ships. Several diesel-electric submarines cycled in and out of the facility and were used to fire Kalibr cruise missiles at Syrian targets.
The port's water depth also accommodated larger ships, including the Russian Navy's oft-mocked flagship, the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier, which was deployed to the eastern Mediterranean between October 2016 and January 2017.
In days prior to the capture of Damascus by Syrian rebel groups, several ships, most of which that had been berthed at Tartus, were spotted heading out to sea, stoking speculation that an evacuation was under way. Тhe Defense Ministry, however, on December 3 released footage of the flotilla firing missiles, saying the maneuvers were a training exercise.
"What Tartus meant for Russia was the ability to project maritime power and political influence relatively uncontested in the Middle East and allowed to punch above its weight," Fredrik Van Lokeren, a retired Belgian naval officer, wrote in a December 8 blog post.
The Russian ships at Tartus might have been utilized to help Russia's operations in the Black Sea, which have also been severely curtailed by innovative Ukrainian tactics. But the warships are barred from transiting Turkey's Bosporus by international treaty.
Forced Air
Located some 60 kilometers up the coast from Tartus, Russia's air forces have utilized the Hmeimim air base. In addition to hosting fighter jets and helicopters, it's also served as the destination for the massive cargo planes that have shuttled men and materiel in and out of Syria.
Russian engineers enlarged the base in 2016-17, lengthening runways and expanding parking capacity. Putin paid an unannounced visit to the base in December 2017, where he declared victory of Syria's rebel forces, whom he called "terrorists."
"If the terrorists again raise their heads, we will deal such blows to them as they have never seen," he said at the time.
Russia's air fleet in Syria included more than two dozen Su-24 and Su-25 frontline bombers and ground-attack aircraft, according to a semi-official report published in 2016, along with at least eight advanced Su-30 fighter bombers and 12 Mi-24 and Ka-52 attack helicopters, among others.
From September 2015 to January 2018, CSIS estimates, Russian forces flew more than 34,000 combat sorties, with Su-24s and Su-34s serving as the primary strike aircraft.
Russian forces also deployed short-range Iskander-M ballistic missiles systems, as well as the sophisticated long-range S-400 air-defense system and short-range defenses like Pantsir and Tor systems. All would have to be shipped out by air or sea.
In recent days, commercial satellite imagery has shown the presence of several Ilyushin Il-76 jets -- heavy-lift workhorse cargo planes -- parked on the runways at Hmeimim, suggesting the possibility of the beginning of an evacuation.
However, given the amount of weaponry and equipment deployed to Syria and Moscow's reluctance to leave it for Syrian rebels, it would require dozens of flights or sea shipment to remove it all. It will be difficult to hide that, said Dara Massicot, an expert on the Russian military at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
From Latakia To Donbas
The best explanation for the dizzying collapse of Assad and his military is the absence of support from Damascus's two strongest allies: Iran and Russia. Where Russia is concerned, the explanation leads to its unrelenting invasion of Ukraine, now in its 34th month with no end in sight.
Russia's casualties there have climbed past 600,000, according to Western estimates, and its economy is running at torrid pace, as defense factories rush to keep pace with Ukraine's destruction of weaponry and equipment.
That means little spare capacity -- men and material -- to bolster Syria's efforts.
The Kremlin may still end up reaching an agreement with the rebel leadership and preserve access to one or both facilities in Syria. If not, however, Russia's ability to project military or economic power will be severely curtailed.
The two facilities were a key conduit for covert and overt military supplies in north and central Africa, as well as a conduit for revenues generated in several countries, often under dubious circumstances.
That includes places like Libya, where Russian mercenaries and irregular forces fought alongside a renegade Libyan general, Khalifa Haftar, in a 2019 offensive to seize the port of Tripoli.
Russia operations have also spread to other troubled African regions like the Central African Republic and Niger. Last July, in Mali, a Russian mercenary force suffered major losses in a battle with Tuareg rebels.
Experts say Russia could shift some aviation operations to Libya, about 1,500 kilometers to the southwest across the Mediterranean. But it would be more difficult to fly cargo jets all the way from Russia to Libya loaded down with heavy weaponry -- even assuming Russia could secure overflight rights from Turkey.
Russian war bloggers have voiced alarmed about the potential loss of Russian bases in Syria.
"Russia's military presence in the Middle East region hangs by a thread," Rybar, a blogger with links to Defense Ministry, said in a post on Telegram.
"It is almost impossible to evacuate the bases. In the best case, it is possible to evacuate most of the personnel, documentation and serviceable aircraft," one prominent blogger, named FighterBomber, said in a Telegram post prior to Assad's fall. "Some equipment that's still running can be packed into dry cargo ships and landing ships, but of course not all. All the rest of the property will remain at the bases."
