The sudden cave of the Bashar Al-Assad regime in Syria in December 2024 ended more than 50 years of brutal reign of the Assad family. This can also mark the end of an even longer prestige quo in which Russia and the Soviet Union, before, were the main army device supplier in Syria.
Assad’s reversal through Islamist-led opposition forces has not led to prompt calls by the new Russian army government in Syria to abandon its two coastal bases. However, Russia has reduced its presence and withdrawn from the weapons and warship complex of those bases. The Tartus naval base remains the only such base Russia has outside the former Soviet Union.
Overall, the Russian army’s long run in Syria looks bleak. The new Syrian government has canceled a lease for the Tartus, and the recent docking of two Russian ships suggests that a full evacuation may have already begun. And with Turkey’s regional heavyweight now in a position to influence its neighbor’s long careers, economically and militarily, according to a recent Reuters report, Moscow’s longstanding role as Syria’s top arms supplier would have arguably reached its final days as well.
If so, that would mark the end of an era spanning almost 70 years.
“Between 1956 and 1991, Syria won about 5,000 Moscow tanks, 1,200 combat aircraft, 70 ships and many other systems and weapons, for more than 26 billion dollars, according to Russian estimates,” says a recent BBC report. “Much of this was destined for wars between Syria and Israel, which largely explained the country’s foreign policy since he received his independence from France in 1946”.
In fact, to Israel’s wonderful chagrin, in all its wars opposed to Syria and its clashes with the Syrian army, it has encountered an adversary most commonly armed through the Soviets. During the Arab-Israeli wars of June 1967 and October 1973, Syria, Syria, fought Israel with MIG-15, MIG-17 and MIG-21 tanks in the air and T-55 and T-62 tanks on the ground. However, in 1967, they lost the Golan Heights to Israel and failed in their attempt to reconquer this strategic territory in 1973.
Syria would continue to re -edge with Soviet devices and ammunition in the 1970s to rebuild their losses of those wonderful wars and modernize their armed forces. According to the vast weapons movement database of the Stockholm Peace Research Institute, Syrian acquisitions at that time included more T-62 tanks, new MIG-23 combatants and S-Air 75 defenses (SA-2). In 1980, Syria received the delivery of Foxbats from the MIG-25 the mid -1980s, the Soviet Union also provided Syria in Syria more than a dozen Elegance missile ships of Osa, known as Moskit of the 205 project in the Soviet service).
You’re going to see, in many ways, arms deliveries from Moscow to Syria reaching their peak.
In 1982, after Syria deployed some of its most productive Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, Israel carried out an unprecedented operation to destroy enemy air defenses, ridding Lebanon of this strategic risk. , which invaded that year. In subsequent dogfights, new, American-made Israeli F-15s and F-16s would shoot down more than 80 Syrian fighters without a single casualty in return. qualitative merit of American-made Israeli weapons over the Syrian Soviet arsenal.
Despite this setback, Syria continued to gain giant amounts of Soviet weapons. The Reagan administration expressed its considerations in 1983 about the Soviet army’s advisers to Syria and the delivery of long-range S-200 missiles (SA-5 Gammon) to the Syrian army. The SIPRI database notes that the delivery of 11 Angara S-200 systems from 1982 to 1986 “in reaction to Israeli good fortune in attacks opposed to Syrian forces in Lebanon” and that they were “used through Soviet troops until ‘in 1985’.
At the end of 1985, Syria located S-75 near the Lebanese border, alarming Israel, who protested that these systems can threaten their common surveillance flights over Lebanon. Stating that Israel planned a new action of the army opposed to it, Syria said that in a position for war and, in a reference oblique to its superpower weapons provider, he warned that he would not fight this war alone.
The Syrian Defense Minister claimed twice in the same year that the Soviet Union had already agreed to supply nuclear weapons to Damascus in case Israel launched a nuclear attack on Syria. Unsurprisingly, a Soviet official dismissed the claims as “pure nonsense. ” (Damascus most likely made up for the defeat in the Bekaa Valley and the bombing of its positions in Lebanon by the US Navy the following year, after 241 US service members were infamously killed in the bombing of the military barracks from Beirut. )
A Jane’s Weekly Defense Report in 1986 noted that massive imports of Soviet weapons from Syria made it a “formidable fighting machine” but resulted in the accumulation of giant debts that it might not pay, the accumulation It was not enough to be triumphant over Israel in any other war.
Syria continued improving its air defenses with Soviet imports throughout the 1980s, receiving Buk-1M and Osa surface-to-air missile systems. It also bought a fleet of fourth-generation MiG-29 Fulcrum fighter jets and Su-24 Fencer bombers. It built a sizable surface-to-surface missile arsenal of Scuds and SS-21s. Notably, Moscow denied Damascus the longer-range SS-23 (OTR-23 Oka).
By the end of the decade, there were signs that the peak of military relations between Moscow and Damascus had passed. The Soviet Union announced that it would consider cutting its military aid to Syria, emphasizing that Damascus’s “ability” to pay for weapons was “not unlimited”, but under pressure sought to maintain cordial relations. Syrian officials have cited the U. S. military’s generous assistance to Israel when requesting Moscow’s help.
A dark incident also hinted at tensions just beneath the surface of the relationship. One morning in 1989, two Syrian helicopters fired on a Soviet Navy cruiser docked in the Syrian coastal town of Latakie, killing two Soviet sailors. While the incident remains controversial, one analyst has opined that the timing may have indicated that Damascus did not so subtly signal its misfortune with certain aspects of relations with its Soviet patron at the time.
In any case, the Soviet Union was not far from this global at the time. The Berlin Wall fell overnight in November 1989, and the entire political system, the superpower that supports Syria, ceased to exist at the end of December 1991.
Unexpected Soviet-era arms deals were frozen and the cash-strapped Russian Federation temporarily proposed a new relationship with Syria. According to the revised date, Moscow would sell defensive weapons to Damascus. Furthermore, this would now require hard currency notes. Gone are the days when Soviet ideology prevailed over market principles in dealing with its closest Arab arms customer.
Reports were in 1992 claiming that Russia and Syria had reached a $2 billion deal signed in 1991, which included SU-27 flanker fighter complexes and S-300 air defense missile systems. This agreement never came to fruition.
When President Hafez al-Assad visited Moscow in July 1999, he proposed a $2 billion deal including Su-27s and S-300s. The U.S. warned Russian President Boris Yeltsin that it might cancel $50 million in aid if Moscow made new arms deals with Damascus.
Syria never had the sleek Su-27 or the complicated S-300, and ultimately only received anti-tank missiles and man-portable surface-to-air missiles in the 1990s and 2000s.
Russia Syria with 1,000 of its new Kornet antibancial guided missiles in 1999, the largest arms agreement implemented between Moscow and Damascus since the Soviet collapse at that time. The Syrian army would obtain approximately 1,500 Kornet missiles until 2006, according to the SIPRI database figures.
Russia concluded a deal to sell Syrian Igla (SA-18) man-portable air defense missiles in 2005. To appease US and Israeli considerations that Syria could simply move those Manpads to outfits like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Moscow said those missiles They were just missiles. . For the Strelet formula. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov noted in March 2005: “It is not a portable air defense formula, it is portable,” he stated. “Tensions are a broad and confusing formula for not shipping in the mountains. ” (Russia even shared documents with Israel the following month that appeared the stre had several Igla missiles designed solely to be extracted from its powered launcher. )
Syria also ordered Pantsir-S1 and Buk-M2 medium-range air defenses, as well as Yakhont supersonic anti-ship missiles in the late 2000s. Unsurprisingly, Israel has protested many of those deals and has attempted, unsuccessfully, convince Russia to cancel them.
Many of those new systems began to arrive when the country fell into a devastating civil war when Bashar al-Assad violently suppressed a nonviolent protest movement encouraged during the Arab Spring across the region in 2011. This resulting clash would last for more than a decade and leave at least 500,000 Syrians dead.
During that war, the Assad regime remodeled its Soviet-era army hardware and new Russian-made missile system, destroying entire cities. At the same time, Syria’s military hardware has done little to protect the country against external threats. Syria’s air defenses did not hamper Israel’s air campaign, which primarily targeted Iranian-backed elements in the war-torn country (Israel lost an F-16 in February 2018 after the pilots were ejected after being fired upon by a Syrian S-200 while returning from a strike mission The fighter crashed on the Israeli aspect of the border, and any of the team members. survived).
That Israeli campaign would significantly degrade Syria’s air defenses and prevent Iran from fulfilling its expressed intent to improve and upgrade them. Reports in Russian and Syrian state media indicated Syria’s newer systems, namely the Pantsir-S1 and Buk-M2s, had some success intercepting Israeli air-launched standoff munitions.
Another contentious Russian-Syrian deal for Israel the 2010 order of high-altitude S-300 air defenses, which were to deliver through mid-2014 and were far more complex than any other formula Syria had. Russia would later deliver an S-300 to Syria in 2018, yet under markedly other circumstances.
Russia intervened directly in the Syrian Civil War in September 2015, after Assad lost substantial ground to his armed opponents and looked on the brink of defeat. Russia’s military intervention gradually helped the Assad regime, which also had significant Iranian support in the form of militias, repel the armed opposition’s advances and utterly devastate east Aleppo in a ferocious bombing campaign in 2016.
During his deployment in Syria, which lasted just a decade, Russia provided devices to the exhausted and reduced Syrian army. In 2015, it delivered a dozen important T-90s war tanks, followed by larger T-62m tanks, although modernized, and BMP-1 infantry combat vehicles.
A photo taken on March 4, 2017 shows a Syrian Army T-62 tank at the broken site of the former Array. [+] City of Palmyra in central Syria. Syrian troops supported by Russian aircraft completed the recapture of the historic city of Palmyra from fighters of the Islamic State (IS) organization on March 2, 2017. (Photo by Louai Beshara/AFP Getty Images)
The S-300 “Syrian” was not delivered until 2018, after a Syrian S-200 demolished a Russian transport plane while fired to near Israeli combat aircraft, wearing the air attacks in its territory. Russia blamed Israel for the incident and without delay passed on the formula. However, there was a problem. The strategic formula remained firmly under the Russian army and was exclusively Syria. To make matters worse, Russia took her out of the country in 2022, since she committed more resources to exhaust her war in Ukraine.
While Russia purportedly delivered modernized MiG-29s to Syria in June 2020, that was most likely a cover for the covert delivery of unmarked Fulcrums to Libya, which stopped at Russia’s main Syrian airbase, Hmeimim, en route to Libya’s Al Jufra. Rare footage of Syria’s MiG-29s surfaced the month before, with clearly visible signs of immense wear and tear.
The last two Russian weapons deliveries to Syria indexed in the SIPRI database were from 2021 and consisted of 4 Mi-24P combat helicopters and 50 R-73 short-range air-to-air missiles for the MiG-29. invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, carried out a joint air patrol with the Syrian Air Force, adding along the Euphrates River and in the Syrian Golan Heights, on the border with Israel. This was obviously an attempt to demonstrate control of the country’s airspace, which, especially in retrospect, has been largely symbolic.
The immediate collapse of the Syrian regime in December 2024 and the evacuation of Bashar al-Assad to Moscow through Hmeimim made the death sentence of the former Syrian army sound. Feeling a historical opportunity, Israel has introduced numerous air attacks, destroying the remaining parts of a military arsenal that took more than 50 years to build in a few days, with impunity. The maximum vital military in Syria, adding its fleet of MIG-29, went to smoke and all its Osa Elegant missile ships were sunk while they were still tied in the port.
With Russia’s days in the country most likely numbered, it seems unlikely that Syria’s new leadership will rely on it for arms to the extent the Assad dynasty did for the duration of its rule. They may not even seek Russia as a significant arms supplier at all and make a complete break with this decades-old status quo. Rather than try and rebuild the old military, Syria may start over by acquiring arms from Turkey and other regional countries.
Syria will probably be the maximum maximum in internal security for the foreseeable future. Therefore, Turkish-made drones and armored cars can meet your needs faster. Turkey has used its indigenous weapons systems in Syria many times before, basically opposed to Syrian Kurdish-led forces, but also, in a notable operation in Idlib in 2020, opposed to the previous regime, to devastating effect.
Whatever Damascus ultimately decides to do in the long term, it already appears evident that the days of Russia serving as its leading arms supplier have come to an ignominious end.
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