Bogged Down in Ukraine, Russia Pays a Price in Syria

Lines of Russian troops in desert khaki greeted President Vladimir V. Putin in Syria in 2017. Declaring that Moscow had accomplished its mission in Syria’s civil war, Mr. Putin pledged that Russia was there to stay.

“If the terrorists raise their heads again,” he said on the tarmac of a Russian air base, “we will deal unprecedented strikes unlike anything they have seen.”

But over the last two weeks, as the rebels that Russia called terrorists swept across Syria aiming to topple one of Russia’s closest allies, President Bashar al-Assad, those “unprecedented” strikes were nowhere to be seen. Instead, with Mr. al-Assad’s ouster on Sunday, Mr. Putin has suffered one of the biggest geopolitical setbacks of his quarter-century in power.

He took that blow, analysts said, in large part because his military is bogged down in Ukraine.

“Our involvement over there had a cost,” a Moscow-based analyst focusing on the Middle East, Anton Mardasov, said, referring to Russia’s war in Ukraine. “The cost was Syria.”

By Sunday, Russia had been reduced from kingmaker to bystander. Its foreign ministry issued a statement of “extreme concern” about “the dramatic events” and announced that Mr. al-Assad had left the country. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told Russian news agencies that he had nothing to add. Mr. Putin himself has said nothing about Syria in recent weeks.

The extent of the fallout for Moscow of Mr. al-Assad’s removal is still to be determined. The key question, analysts said, is whether Russia manages to strike an agreement with Syria’s new government to hold on to its Tartus naval base and its Hmeimim air base, where Mr. Putin delivered that victory speech in 2017.

Mr. Mardasov said he was unsure whether Russia would be able to strike such a deal, given that Russia used those bases for overwhelming airstrikes against Syria’s opposition after the Kremlin intervened in Syria’s civil war in 2015. Losing the Syrian bases would thwart some of Mr. Putin’s ambitions to reestablish Russia as a world power, since they are crucial to the Kremlin’s ability to flex its muscles in places as far away as West Africa.

“Syria is their only real foothold in the Middle East and the Mediterranean,” said Eugene Rumer, the director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. The rebel victory, he said, has become “part of the price they are paying for the war in Ukraine.”

The Kremlin is also likely to bear a broader cost to its image. In Mr. Putin’s widening conflict with the West, he has been trying to position Russia as a decisive, reliable leader of a global coalition against what he calls American hegemony.

“What good is Russia as a partner if it cannot save its oldest client in the Middle East from a ragtag band of militias?” Mr. Rumer asked. “Besides the operational setback, it is also a diplomatic and reputational blow.”

Just a few years ago, Syria stood out as the biggest symbol of Russia’s resurgence on the world stage. Its sweeping, bloody airstrikes bombed opposition groups into submission and turned the fighting in Mr. al-Assad’s favor, sending the message that Russia was prepared to use overwhelming force to stand by its allies and assert its own interests.

The United States, by contrast, was increasingly seen in the region as an unreliable power that was disengaging from the Middle East. And after Mr. al-Assad’s grip on authority seemed secure, Russia used its Syrian bases as a staging point to compete for influence with the West in African countries like Libya, Mali and the Central African Republic.

But after Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, Syria plummeted down the Kremlin’s priority list. Russia’s bases in Syria became known as places where commanders who had failed in Ukraine were put out to pasture, and as a draw for soldiers hoping to avoid the trenches of Ukraine.

Syria turned into a “resort destination” for Russian soldiers compared with the carnage of Ukraine’s battlefields, Mr. Mardasov, the analyst in Moscow, said. And for underperforming generals, he said, service in Syria “was a kind of exile.”

Moscow dispatched one general to Syria after he presided over Russia’s botched attack on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, early in its invasion. A second arrived after being held responsible for sending Russia’s elite airborne troops to their deaths. A third took over the Syria command after his troops failed to capture Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine.

The focus on Ukraine left Russia flat-footed when the new rebel offensive began. Russia launched strikes against the Syrian rebels, but with far less intensity than at the height of its intervention in the civil war.

An American official said the United States believed that this was because many Russian aircraft had been pulled out of Syria for operations in Ukraine.

Warplanes that Russia may have otherwise sent to reprise the brutal bombing campaigns were instead committed to Ukraine. Warships that Russia might have dispatched from the Black Sea were unable to transit into the Mediterranean because of a treaty that allows Turkey to close its straits to the navy of a nation at war.

And a once-fearsome Russian mercenary force, the Wagner group, had its Syrian operations dissolved last year after its leader, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, staged a failed mutiny against Russian military chiefs.

“The priorities totally changed,” said Denis Korotkov, a Russian journalist who was among the first to document the Wagner group. “There was no time for Syria.”

Russia’s support of the al-Assad regime dated to the Soviet Union’s backing of Mr. al-Assad’s father, President Hafez al-Assad, in the 1970s. Now Russia appears to be turning to diplomacy to try to salvage its footprint in Syria.

Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, held talks with his Iranian and Turkish counterparts in Qatar on Saturday, and Mr. Putin has spoken by phone with the leaders of those two countries in recent days.

In a sign that Russia could seek accommodation with Syria’s new powers, Russian state television on Sunday appeared to soften the language it used to refer to the forces that toppled Mr. al-Assad.

On Saturday night, state television broadcasts referred to them as “terrorists” or “militants” backed by foreign powers. By Sunday morning, Russian state media started calling them “armed opposition” or “armed groups.”

Russia’s best hope, analysts say, may be to negotiate with Turkey — which backs some of the rebel groups — to help it maintain its Syrian bases. But it’s far from clear that Turkey would have the power or influence to persuade the rebels to accept such a deal.

“If they can secure their bases and reach an agreement with Turkey, they could be reasonably satisfied,” said Antonio Giustozzi, a scholar at the Royal United Services Institute in London who has tracked Russia’s presence in Syria.

“It all depends on whether Erdogan can really control” the rebels, Mr. Giustozzi added, referring to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

The new reliance on diplomacy represents a sharp contrast to Russia’s readiness before its Ukraine invasion to use force in Syria to advance its interests. Beyond its air power, Mr. Putin leaned on the Wagner mercenary group that Mr. Prigozhin built into one of Syria’s most effective fighting machines.

But Mr. Prigozhin redeployed many of his men from Syria to the fight in Ukraine. And after his failed mutiny in June 2023 and subsequent death in a plane crash two months later, Russia’s Defense Ministry forced what remained of Wagner forces in Syria to depart or join its ranks.

This weekend, former Wagner fighters took in the news from Syria with stunned dismay. In a text message exchange from Ukraine, a former Wagner mercenary who had fought in Syria and now serves in the Russian military said, “Everyone’s disappointed.”

“We sacrificed so many guys there back in the day to achieve success,” said the former mercenary, Aleksandr, speaking on condition of partial anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to comment to the news media. “And now, they’ve given it up so easily.”

Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt and Julian E. Barnes from Washington, Milana Mazaeva from New York, and Nataliya Vasilyeva from Istanbul.