Russian forces stay put at key military bases in Syria

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Russia is holding on to the main naval and air bases it uses as staging points for the Mediterranean and Africa, even as it pulls its forces back from smaller outposts in Syria following the overthrow of its ally Bashar al-Assad.

Satellite imagery reviewed on Tuesday showed no signs of a Russian withdrawal from the Tartus naval base or Hmeimim air base near Latakia, both on the west coast of Syria.

These facilities were critical for enabling the Kremlin to support Assad’s now-fallen regime in the Syrian civil war, but also serve as a key logistics bridge for Russia to the south.

The Kremlin has said the future of its bases in Syria will depend on negotiations with the new authorities after the Assad regime was toppled by rebel forces led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

Assad fled the country on Sunday after HTS took the Syrian capital, Damascus, and was given asylum in Russia by President Vladimir Putin.

Losing the bases in Syria could cost Russia a permanent presence for its navy in the Mediterranean, as well as a stop-off point for operations in Africa, said Pavel Luzin, a visiting scholar at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

The Ilyushin Il-76, Russia’s mainstay Soviet-era heavy transporter aircraft, has a flight range of 4,200km with a medium load. Without access to a Syrian base, Russia’s forces would need to use one or possibly several other airfields to conduct far-flung operations.

“Obviously, Russia would like to retain at least a symbolic presence at these bases, so its defeat doesn’t look so obvious. But whether that happens or not depends on how the political process in Syria itself develops,” Luzin said.

Putin’s overwhelming focus on his invasion of Ukraine has already diminished Russia’s capacity in Syria, leading some prominent hardline voices to begrudgingly accept Moscow’s loss of influence in the region.

“What are you going to do, rip your hair out?” Andrei Medvedev, a well-known Russian state television presenter, wrote on social media app Telegram. “Obviously if we lose the bases in Syria we lose Africa. It’ll be almost impossible to fly cargo to the CAR [Central African Republic] or Mali . . . Well, we’ll develop Siberia instead.”

While satellite imagery and transponder traffic reveal heavy-lift aircraft traffic into Hmeimim over the past week, analysts say that the tempo of arrivals and departures are not consistent with a hurried departure. No ships have yet arrived at Tartus to enable a maritime evacuation of equipment or personnel.

“The strong indicators of change are how many Ilyushins and Antonovs are cycling through. And if they have to leave Tartus, you’d actually see more ships show up to help move things out,” said Dara Massicot, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “If an evacuation was happening, we would know.”

Satellite imagery on Monday revealed that two Russian frigates, a submarine and a support vessel, previously photographed in the port of Tartus on December 6, had left. But photos from Planet Labs and Nasa show vessels matching their sizes holding positions about 8km to 10km offshore.

A vessel of similar size to one of the frigates is visible in a similar location in a cloud-obscured photograph taken by the European Space Agency on Tuesday morning.

“The Russians don’t want them to get hit, so they pull them out to loiter at sea,” Massicot said, noting that the ships had been moved outside the range of mortar fire.

If Russia decided to evacuate its naval presence, the ships would be likely to be barred by the Turkish government from crossing into the Black Sea via the Bosphorus. In such a case, the nearest Russian base would be Kaliningrad on the Baltic — a long sea journey involving refuelling on a route surrounded by Nato countries.

Cartography by Steven Bernard