Owen Matthews
The Spectator World, Dec. 8, 2024
“Syria never became a great patriotic project for Putin’s Kremlin. Russia’s airbase in Hmemim and a tiny naval base at Tartus, near Latakia, were always of more symbolic and diplomatic value than practical.”
The Kremlin’s involvement in Syria’s civil war was always, first and foremost, about posing as a great multi-regional power rather than actually being one. Vladimir Putin’s deployment of a single squadron of war planes to Hmemim airbase in Syria in 2015 brought a gun to a knife-fight. The Assad regime had been fighting insurgents with poison gas and infamous “barrel bombs” rolled out of helicopters. Russian Su-24 and Su-35 fighter-bombers and Kamov helicopter gunships were quickly able to turn the tide against the growing rebellion and undoubtedly saved Bashir al-Assad’s regime. Unlike America’s multi-trillion dollar investment in Iraq and Afghanistan, Putin was able to change the fate of a nation by sending just thirty aircraft and deploying just 2,300 personnel on the ground — plus a few hundred Wagner mercenaries.
Putin’s intervention in 2015 allowed him to play the Middle Eastern power broker, just as his Soviet predecessors had done — except without the expense and effort of spending billions of rubles on military aid, building dams, universities and schools as the USSR had done for decades across the region. At the time the Kremlin was newly isolated in the wake of Russia’s snap annexation of Crimea in February 2014. The Syria gambit was Putin’s answer to those western leaders — led by the Obama White House — who sought to contain, downplay and ignore Russia. As the savior and supporter of the Assad regime, Putin has to be reckoned with and respected as a player in the region alongside Iran, Israel and Turkey.
The Kremlin marked its victory over Syria’s jihadists with a spectacular piece of political theatre. On May 5, 2016, Russia’s leading conductor Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Symphony Orchestra were flown from St. Petersburg to perform pieces by Bach, Prokofiev and Shchedrin at the Roman Theater in the ancient ruins of Palmyra. An audience of Russian soldiers, government ministers and journalists sat where a year before ISIS had filmed the public execution of its enemies — including the beheading of Palmyra’s director of antiquities Khaled al-Asaad. It was a brilliant set-piece of propaganda illustrating the triumph of western civilization over Islamist obscurantism and violence — though Assad regime forces, assisted by Russian GRU military intelligence, wrought bloody revenge on ISIS members wherever they found them, especially those originally from Russia.
Yet Syria never became a great patriotic project for Putin’s Kremlin. Russia’s airbase in Hmemim and a tiny naval base at Tartus, near Latakia, were always of more symbolic and diplomatic value than practical. Tartus, for instance, was notionally the forward operating headquarters of Russia’s grandly-entitled Mediterranean Sea Task Force. Yet (as a quick glance at Google Maps will reveal) the main wharf at Tartus is just 100 meters long, and not long or deep enough for the larger ships of Mediterranean Sea Task Force — such as the missile frigate Admiral Grigorovich — to actually dock there. Furthermore since the beginning of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 the Russian fleet at Tartus has effectively been cut off from its closest home base of Sevastopol in the Black Sea under the terms of the Montreux Convention, which bars passage of warships though the Bosporus Straits in wartime (unless returning to base). Thus in practice, all Russian ships using Tartus would have to sail all the way from the Baltic or the Arctic. And in any case earlier this week all Russian warships and auxiliaries left Tartus and Russian personnel and aircraft have been evacuated from Hmemim, according to Ukrainian military intelligence. …Source
