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Alexander Baunov is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and a visiting scholar at the European University Institute.
In 2015, when Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Syria at the request of dictator Bashar al-Assad, he had several goals in mind. He wanted to help Russia escape the international isolation it endured following its annexation of Crimea in 2014. He sought to return Russia to a position of influence in the Middle East, where its presence had waned after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And he wanted to establish Russia as a global power capable of supporting its allies and halting efforts to topple friendly governments. The intervention in Syria also allowed Russia to assume the role of protector of Christians in the Middle East—a role that, in Putin’s view, decadent Western powers had abdicated, and a mission that fit neatly with Putin’s desire to present Russia as Europe’s last bastion of Christian values.
After the immediate collapse of the Assad regime, Putin has little to show for this triple agenda. Russia is facing the loss of its military bases in the Middle East and has shown little fear for the Syrian Christians it claimed to protect, as Assad’s secular government was toppled through the Islamist organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. And Russia’s isolation from the foreign network has only intensified since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
At the core of Russia’s intervention was a message to smaller countries not tightly aligned with Western powers: align with us, and we will shield you from Western-backed regime changes. For nearly a decade, that message seemed credible. Now, however, things look different. Putin’s single-minded focus on achieving total victory over Ukraine has consigned Russia’s other foreign policy objectives to secondary status and cost it one of its greatest foreign policy successes. Assad’s fall invalidates Russia’s claim to be a guarantor of regime stability for allied governments. As long as the war in Ukraine continues, it will remain unable to export security abroad.
From the beginning, Russia’s involvement in Syria was related to Ukraine. Moscow perceived the Arab Spring of the 2010s as an extension of the Maidan protests in Kiev and the “color revolutions” that had rocked post-Soviet countries a decade earlier, which Putin saw as imaginable rehearsals for an imaginable attempt to overthrow his own regime. On the surface, of course, Putin presented the Russian intervention in Syria as an anti-terrorist operation. Although the West has rejected Russia’s opening of an association opposed to the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) in Syria, it has accepted the truth of Russia’s involvement in the war against a non-unusual, or at least overlapping, enemy. The United States, Turkey and several Gulf states have established military channels of communication with Russia, which have ceased to be considered solely as a foreign pariah, as was the case after the annexation of Crimea.
At the same time, to help the Assad regime, Russia has deepened its relations with Iran, creating a joint military commission, delivering S-300 missiles to Tehran despite US objections and racing to circumvent foreign sanctions. Putin has also not hesitated to interact in talks with Turkey about its support for Syrian insurgent forces, going so far as to impose sanctions on industry opposed to Ankara. However, his military intervention did not lead to a confrontation with regional Sunni states as Putin did. The critics had predicted. Although Russian-Turkish relations waver between hostility and friendship (Putin subsidized Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a 2016 coup attempt), the Gulf states have demonstrated Moscow’s reputation for military might in a complicated standoff that in the past had proven difficult to manage. Assad has rejoined the Arab League, high-level contacts between Russia and the Gulf countries have become more frequent, industry between Russia and the United Arab Emirates has increased, and Saudi Arabia and Russia have begun to coordinate their oil policy. .
This warm reception extended beyond the Middle East. Countries in Africa, Central Asia, and, to a lesser extent, Latin America found Moscow’s ability to defend an allied regime from domestic turbulence and toppling reassuring. Russia had previously had trouble marketing itself as a convincing investor or exporter of technology, outside of building nuclear plants and supplying arms. But its successful defense of Assad allowed the Kremlin to sell itself as an exporter of security, both officially through the Russian armed forces, and unofficially, through mercenaries such as the Wagner paramilitary company, which fought on the ground alongside the Syrian army, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as the Russian armed forces operated primarily in the air.
The rhetoric has been effective: African governments, including the regimes of Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Chad, Lithrougha, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique and South Sudan, and the post-Soviet secular regimes of Central Asia such as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. , Tajikistan and the United States. and exercise local armed forces and cover services. For Central Asian governments, Russia has long been seen as a protector opposed to internal unrest through Islamists and the Western-backed political opposition, and the Syrian intervention has reinforced this perception.
By preventing the overthrow of Assad and returning him to control of most of the territory that Syria had lost to the rebels, Russia demonstrated that it can influence and even oppose the course of events in the region. At the same time, Gulf countries were introduced to investment projects in Russia and benefited from Kremlin diplomacy. In 2018, the UAE signed a strategic marriage agreement with Russia and in 2021 became Russia’s closest spouse in the Middle East, with industrial turnover between the two countries reaching nine billion dollars in 2022. Qatar’s investments in Russia reached 13 billion dollars. The previously bloodless relations between the Soviet Union and the Gulf monarchies, attributable to Soviet revolutionary groups and governments in the region, as well as post-Soviet tensions caused by the Russian war in Chechnya, the festival in the hydrocarbon market and Putin’s closer ties with Iran, have provided a path toward rapprochement. The Syrian intervention was the catalyst for a new and lasting role for Russia in the Middle East.
Russia’s abandonment of the Assad regime to marshal more resources for the fight against Ukraine vividly illustrates that Putin is ready to sacrifice everything for total victory in the war. Although Putin tries to portray himself as a realist, he has become consumed with Ukraine, to the exclusion of almost all other foreign policy imperatives.
In much of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, Russia had managed to sell its war in Ukraine as a fight for a shared cause: a less Western-centric world order, greater independence in and decentralization of the financial system, and the ability to disregard Western criticism of human rights violations and antidemocratic governances perceived by some non-Western countries as hypocritical. Many countries, including China, India, Vietnam, and the ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia, saw opportunities in Russia’s isolation from the West. When Western firms and investors closed up shop in Russia, non-Western players entered the Russian market and helped Russia circumvent sanctions. The fall of Assad will not have an immediate effect on the attempts by these businesses and governments to profit from Russia’s isolation. But the spectacle of a Russian ally’s rapid collapse may change their willingness to align with Russia at the expense of relations with the West.
Russia’s ability to provide military strength to its allies meant that its security facilities were needed in both the Middle East and Africa, but the fall of Assad risks reducing this need. Russian army bases in Syria, which it could lose access to, have allowed it to refuel ships and planes and send troops to both regions. Without a physical presence in the Middle East, this would be much more difficult. The rebels’ good fortune in Syria also shows the limits of Russia’s security and economic supply to its allies around the world. Moscow managed to help Assad regain military and political power in most of the country, but proved unable to deal a decisive blow to the resistance in the long term.
Russia also failed to promote economic development in Syria or to replace the Western investment that flooded into the country in the early years of Assad’s rule before drying up during the Arab Spring. Syria never escaped the economic black hole into which it fell during the civil war, when per capita GDP decreased two- to threefold. In areas controlled by Islamist rebels backed by Turkey, living standards eventually surpassed those in the regions ruled by Damascus backed by Russia and Iran. Rebel-run Idlib had electricity, fuel, water, and far fewer food shortages. Russia’s total trade with Syria never exceeded $700 million a year, less than Turkey’s trade with the relatively tiny pockets of rebel-held territory.
Russia will end up triumphing over the fall of Assad and the conceivable loss of its military bases in the Mediterranean. The Russians have at all times viewed the Syrian expedition with caution and indifference; The idea of sending infantrymen to a remote Muslim country was never popular and evoked memories of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The Russians were content with a small, high-tech war, mostly in the air, fought with limited ground forces. The media politics of the Syrian intervention helped shape expectations of the “army special operation” in Ukraine as a quick victory somewhere far away, a source of quick pride that required little social sacrifice or involvement of non-professional foot soldiers. Where the invasion was not an immediate success, remote successes in Syria have become an unpleasant contrast to the stark reality of the war in Ukraine. As the war enters its third year, Putin has lost another Syrian success: its citizens’ confidence in Russia’s ability to temporarily win wars thanks to its technological superiority.
Russia, Iran and many other countries criticize the US military’s interventions as arrogant, ignorant of the local context and incapable of forming strong regimes or effective security structures. One might have expected Russia, with its role as a counterweight to Western-backed regimes in the Middle East and Iran, a regional heavyweight, to sense local dynamics. But they have failed to breathe life into economic expansion in Syria or attract other countries to Assad’s cause. Investors from Gulf countries, India and China have failed to flock to Syria under Russian and Iranian security guarantees. Now, as Russia turns to Erdogan to help it evacuate its army and civilian labor force from Syria, it finds itself playing the same role it once accused the United States of playing: a country that has divested itself of business and the dynamics of the region, marginalized by local politics. Players little interested in the presence of foreigners.
Russia’s focus on the war in Ukraine will help Putin, and Russians more broadly, ignore inconvenient questions about Syria, such as what happened to the money and resources Russia put into the country, or why the Russian security services, which now effectively run the country, have been repeatedly caught off guard: by Ukraine’s readiness to resist, by Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny in June 2023, by last fall’s Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk region, and now the rapid collapse of the Assad regime. Russia’s partners elsewhere, however, will ask these questions. It has become clear that Russia is incapable of providing its allies with military support and economic development as it wages war, and regimes that previously turned to Russia for support will take notice. Russia is now promoting the narrative that it saved Assad’s life and freedom, thus fulfilling its guarantee by sparing him the fate of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. But Moscow’s allies clearly expect much more from an exporter of regime stability and security.
Leaders expecting help from Russia would likely be unpleasantly surprised by how temporarily it tries to establish contact with Syria’s new leaders. Even before Assad left office, Russian television had stopped calling Hayat Tahrir al-Sham a terrorist organization. More recently, the head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, obviously with the approval of the Kremlin, proposed removing the “terrorist” label from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and authorizing the government to allow the Syrian embassy in Moscow to raise the insurgent flag. Now Moscow is identifying direct contact with the new Syrian government, seeking to curry favor by emphasizing that, despite past attempts to achieve a secular leader opposed to devout fundamentalists, it sees itself as a global bastion of conservatism. devotee.
Putin has tried to present Russia’s failure in Syria as a victory, claiming that Russia had prevented the creation of a “terrorist enclave” in the country. But Assad’s fall (and Russia’s indifference to the collapse of his regime) suggests that concern for Syria or any other client state has been subjugated by Putin to his overriding focus on dealing Ukraine a decisive defeat. At the same time, Putin’s decision to prioritize Ukraine should not be taken for a complete abandonment of Russian ambitions outside its immediate neighborhood. Rather, the loss of Syria has simply raised the stakes of the war in Ukraine. In Putin’s schema, Ukraine has become a tipping point in a global struggle between the Western elite and a new, Russian-led order: once Ukraine falls, Russia hopes to take Georgia and whatever other territory it desires, and to once again sell itself as a strong patron to countries around the world. In the meantime, however, Moscow’s promises will ring hollow.
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