Syria - Russia: A pragmatic rapprochement

Visiting the Kremlin on 15 October 2025, Ahmad al-Sharaa would have liked to persuade Vladimir Putin to extradite former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (as well as officers and officials of his regime) who has been granted refuge with his family in Russia since he was overthrown nearly a year ago. This information was confirmed by the Syrian Foreign Minister, Asaad al-Shaibani. In September, a Damascus court issued a warrant for Assad’s arrest, accusing him of premeditated murders and torture resulting in death.

But nothing came of it. In Moscow, it is believed that there is more at stake in the bilateral relationship, as Vladimir Putin spelled out on 15 October:

“We have had diplomatic relations for more than 80 years. During that time, relations between Syria and Russia have always been friendly. In Russia, we have never had relations with Syria linked to political circumstances or special interests.”

In that declaration the ruler of the Kremlin was referring to the relations between Moscow and Damascus forged since the 1950s. These rested in particular on shared anti-western feelings and translated into military, political and economic assistance from the Soviet Union.

Requesting the extradition of ex-President Assad

These words were not welcomed everywhere in Syria. The ousted regime’s opposition, especially the Islamist fighters, remain deeply hostile to Putin on account of the 2015 Russian intervention and the thousands of casualties it caused.

“Our relationship is more complex than that,” says Vasily Kuznetsov, head of the Institute for Oriental Studies in the Russian Academy of Sciences :

“There was no negotiation aimed at maintaining Russian military bases in exchange for the extradition of Bashar al-Assad. Everyone knows that Moscow will not extradite him. But Ahmad al-Sharaa had to put that request and to make it known, given the hatred that his political and social base harbours against the former president.”

Curiously enough, that request for extradition had been preceded by the rumour that Assad had been hospitalised following an attempt to poison him, orchestrated by a former Syrian officer, a rumour reported by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) in a report dated 2 October. According to the SOHR, the Russian government was in no way involved in the incident, but it may have been an attempt to compromise it in order to “suggest that President Putin is incapable of protecting” Bashar al-Assad. The rumour, denied by the Russian authorities including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in person, has barely been mentioned by the main opposition media in Russia.

A long-planned visit

The most important thing for the former jihadi leader is elsewhere. His failure to mention Moscow’s political and military backing of the Assad regime or the Russian bombs dropped on his own troops less than a year before can be explained by Syria’s especially delicate position and the fragility of the new power structure. Al-Sharaa has to cope with many challenges. In addition to the bloody clashes between government forces and local minorities, such as the Alawites in March 2025 and the Druze in July, Syria has been subjected to the interference of regional actors such as Turkey, and Israel, which has launched strikes against Syrian territory and taken over certain areas, especially in the south-west governorate of Quneitra. On top of all that, Syria’s economic situation is troubled to say the least.

Several ministerial delegations have been preparing this presidential visit over recent months. In particular, the Syrian Foreign Minister, Defence Minister Murhaf Abu Qasra, and the intelligence chief, Hussein al-Salama, were all in Moscow on 3 July. These exchanges represented genuine concessions on the part of the interim President. The fact is that recent revelations have disclosed secret negotiations between Moscow and the jihadi group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by al-Sharaa, during the offensive that overthrew Bashar al-Assad’s regime. These discussions persuaded the Kremlin to remain “neutral” during that decisive period. Thus the Russian forces had allowed al-Sharaa’s men to seize Homs, while the latter spared the Russian military base at Hmeimim, to the south-west of Latakia. For Russia this amounted to a full-blown abandonment of Assad.

As a result, during the October negotiations in the Kremlin, the talks were refocused on basic issues: “It was first of all a question of reviving, reviewing and possibly amending the texts governing relations between Damascus and Moscow, the treaties which for decades have sometimes regulated our bilateral relations,” as Vasily Kuznetsov summed up the talks. At the end of these, Ahmad al-Sharaa promised to respect all the previous agreements between the two countries, implying the preservation of the Russian military bases in Syria. The Syrian side stressed the fact that it had no objection to signing accords to renew the relationship, provided however that it was on a “mutually advantageous basis”.

The crucial issue of the bases

Yet despite the outward display of friendliness, the two countries have not come to a formal agreement concerning the preservation of the Russian navy’s military base at Tartous and the airfield at Hmeimim. Often taking a tougher line than his president, Foreign Minister Shaibani insisted after the visit that all the accords concluded with Moscow under the previous regime were “suspended and unacceptable”. He also reiterated Damascus’ insistence on Bashar al-Assad being extradited to face trial in his own country. He suggested too that Moscow should pay reparations for the damage the ousted president inflicted on the country’s economy with the support of Russia.

“The visit to Moscow by the interim Syrian President did not result in an immediate agreement on the preservation of Russian military bases (...). The only public result was Putin’s acknowledgement of the results of the parliamentary election in Syria,” as the independent Russian outlet, The Insider, reported on 16 October.

On the Russian side, the issue of the preservation of the military bases is regarded as crucial. As Vasily Kuznetsov explained :

“They are the only ones that Russia has in the Mediterranean. They provide a strategic advantage both in Syria and the entire Middle East, and even in North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. They may serve as staging posts for Mali, the Central African Republic, Sudan or Burkina Faso.”

To lose these bases - hinted at in a declaration from Damascus at the beginning of the year - would be considered in Moscow an enormous strategic setback. For the moment, the two Russian bases remain operational, although they are less supplied in men and equipment than in recent years.

According to Nikita Smagin, an independent expert on Russian policy in the Middle East,

“the Russian military presence in Syria has declined, but remains sufficient to sustain the logistics of its policies in Africa. In the Middle East, things are more complicated. There, the role of the bases is more symbolic: they help to sustain the image of Russia as a great power in the region.”

The base at Qamishli is also thought to have been discussed, as is reported in a confidential note from a French-based company specializing in the analysis of Russian politics, R. Politik, dated 27 October :

“While the air base at Hmeimim is at present used to supply the Russian ’Africa Corps’ (which has replaced the Wagner militia), the base at Qamishli functions both as a key logistical hub and as a platform for dialogue with the Kurds in a forward-looking perspective. At the same time, the Qamishli base makes any Turkish military operation in the region more complicated....The Russians have reinforced this site during the summer....If Damascus decides to demand payment or places more conditions on the use of Hmeimim and other installations, Qamishli would provide an alternative platform.”

In exchange for this Moscow says it is also prepared to provide Damascus with military equipment, but Smagin has qualified these official assertions :

“Moscow might contribute to the repair of Russian-made equipment left over from the Assad era and not destroyed by Israel, but it is too early to talk about deliveries of more significant weapons. Moscow itself needs air-defence systems and other weaponry for its own use in the war against Ukraine.”

Faced with Turkish and Israeli ambitions

The issue of these bases is complicated by the geopolitical and security situations in the region. Israel is making efforts to weaken and divide its neighbours, starting with Syria which it bombs regularly. On 25 February 2025, Reuters noted Israel’s lobbying in the US “to keep Syria weak and decentralised [i.e. fragmented], even letting Russia keep its military bases to counter the growing Turkish influence in the country.” So to stay in business, the regime is obliged to tolerate the military bases of one much-castigated country because of the lobbying of another doing all it can to weaken it.

However, Russia’s military presence might well limit Israel’s air strikes and territorial occupations, as had been the case on several occasions under the rule of Bashar al-Assad. With that in mind, Damascus is said to have suggested that Moscow redeploy its military police in southern Syria in order to limit Israeli incursions in the demilitarized Golan zone.

Paradoxically in this context, Russia’s strength is also its weakness in Syria. “Russia is less committed, less powerful than Turkey, Israel or certain Gulf monarchies. Which means that for al-Sharaa it is less costly to deal with it than with other countries”, is Kusnetsov’s opinion. In a text published on 1 September 2025 by the Russian Council for International Affairs (RSMD in its Russian acronym), a think tank close to the Foreign Ministry, the scholar Kiril Semenov speculates :

“One essential condition for the success of the indispensable post-war reforms is to prevent any outside actor, and especially Turkey, from dominating the Syrian security space. In this context, Russia, in concertation with its Arab partners (Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Egypt) could make a significant contribution to the progress of the reforms by proposing alternative solutions and providing a multilateral framework to sustain the process of transformation”.

To oil the wheels of Russo-Syrian diplomacy, Moscow has also promised economic aid in the fields of energy, grain supplies, and port or other infrastructure projects.

However, it is not certain that Moscow has the financial means to do this given its war in Ukraine and the tightening of Western sanctions. Perhaps it will be content with a more symbolic form of economic aid through the publicly-owned company Goznak which is said to have signed a contract with Syria to help print its national currency. Russia has been doing this for more than ten years, after the sanctions declared by the European Union and the United States had obliged the former regime to put an end to cooperation with its European supplier.

So it is not out of the question that Bashar al-Assad and his family may continue to live in exile in the twenty or so apartments which they own in Moscow and its surroundings, according to revelations published on 12 October by the German newspaper Die Zeit. As it reports, Assad will be able to continue to spend his days playing video games and strolling freely about the capital, under the protection of a private company hired by the Russian government.

Translated by Noël Burch