Putin Stays Silent on Syria in Meeting With Russia’s Military

Putin Stays Silent on Syria, With Russia’s Future There in Question

In an hourlong televised meeting with his top military brass, Vladimir Putin left Syria unmentioned and made it clear that winning in Ukraine was his top priority.

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By Anton Troianovski

Reporting from Berlin

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For an hour on Monday, President Vladimir V. Putin and his defense minister presided over a televised, annual meeting of the Russian military’s top brass. They held forth on NATO, Ukraine and issues as obscure as mortgages for service members.

But one topic went unmentioned: Syria.

Mr. Putin has yet to say anything in public about the collapse of his close ally, Bashar al-Assad, in Syria more than a week ago, even as Russia struggles to salvage what influence it can in the Middle East. The silence underscores the uncertainty surrounding the future of Russia’s military bases in Syria — and the overwhelming priority for the Kremlin that the war in Ukraine has become.

Mr. al-Assad’s fall is a painful topic right now in Moscow, said Anton Mardasov, a Moscow-based military analyst focusing on the Middle East. “It’s better not to say anything.”

Things were very different just a year ago, when Sergei K. Shoigu, then the defense minister, boasted at the same annual meeting that Russian troops remained deployed both in Syria and Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian-populated enclave that Azerbaijan recaptured from Armenia last year.

“Russian groups of forces remain the backbone and the main guarantee of peace in Syria and Karabakh,” Mr. Shoigu said at the time.

Russian peacekeeping forces pulled out of Nagorno-Karabakh in May, a sign of Russia’s loss of influence in the Caucasus region, which had been part of the Soviet Union.

Now Mr. al-Assad’s ouster could become an even greater setback to Mr. Putin’s efforts to revive Russia as a world power. Mr. Mardasov said a best-case scenario for Russia could be a scaled-down military presence at the Hmeimim air base and the Tartus naval base in the Mediterranean. That could allow Moscow to keep a refueling and staging point for limited military activity there and in Africa.

But that scenario wouldn’t fulfill Mr. Putin’s earlier, broader ambitions of projecting might on the doorstep of NATO. Russian nuclear-capable bombers flew training missions from Syria in 2021, a signal that Mr. Putin saw his military’s presence in the country as a bulwark in his global conflict with the West.

Now, Mr. Mardasov said, the security situation in Syria is likely to remain so tenuous that Russia wouldn’t be able to station nuclear-capable weaponry there even if it struck an agreement to hold on to its bases.

“Such outposts to threaten NATO’s southern flank are already 100 percent lost,” Mr. Mardasov said. “Even if they manage to keep a presence, it will be symbolic.”

To Mr. Putin, the outcome of the war in Ukraine has now become the biggest factor in Russia’s future security. And in that war, he believes he is winning, both on the battlefield and in his standoff with the West, as politicians skeptical of supporting Ukraine, led by President-elect Donald J. Trump, increasingly come to power.

The government in Germany, one of Ukraine’s largest supporters, collapsed on Monday, and the cost of the war is one of the issues likely to dominate the upcoming election campaign. On Thursday, the leaders of the European Union’s 27 member countries are scheduled to meet in Brussels to discuss, among other things, a path forward in Ukraine.

In Syria, Russia has apparently been scaling down its presence in recent days, with convoys of troops that had been stationed across the country seen pulling back to Russia’s Hmeimim and Tartus bases. Satellite images last week showed Russian military equipment being packed up for loading onto transport planes.

Russian officials have sought to engage with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the conservative Islamist group that led the rebel offensive that toppled Mr. al-Assad. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told reporters Monday that there had been “no final decisions” on the future of Russia’s military presence in Syria.

“We are in contact with representatives of the powers that currently control the situation in the country,” Mr. Peskov said. “All this will be determined in the course of the dialogue.”

Just hours before Mr. al-Assad fell on Dec. 8, Russia’s top diplomat, Sergey V. Lavrov, was still describing the Syrian rebels as “terrorists.” In one sign of Russian hopes for rapprochement, one of the country’s most powerful men, the Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, said that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham should be taken off Russia’s terror list.

Mr. Kadyrov, who rules the majority-Muslim Russian republic of Chechnya, also said that Chechen authorities were willing to go on joint patrols “with the Syrian law enforcement agencies.”

It’s not clear whether Moscow’s diplomacy will be enough, however, to allow Russia to keep a military presence. Some European Union officials said Monday that they would seek to make Russia’s exit from Syria a condition of lifting sanctions on Syria.

“Many foreign ministers emphasized that it should be a condition for the new leadership to eliminate Russian influence,” Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, told reporters in Brussels.

But Mr. Putin made clear once more on Monday that Syria had become a secondary concern. In his speech to the military leadership, he claimed his troops “hold the strategic initiative” along the entire front line in Ukraine and that the flow of Russians volunteering to fight “is not stopping.”

It was fresh evidence that Mr. Putin believes he can outlast Ukraine on the battlefield, even as Mr. Trump promises to negotiate a peace deal to end the war. Mr. Putin’s defense minister, Andrei R. Belousov, said in Monday’s meeting that “ensuring victory” in the Ukraine war was the military’s top priority, but he said nothing about its plans or aims in the Middle East.

Russian state television has sought to fill the silence with claims that Russia fulfilled its mission in Syria and that any instability there is now the West’s fault. On the marquee weekly news show on the Rossiya channel on Sunday, the host, Dmitri Kiselyov, said that Russia had made contact with “the leaders of the armed opposition” and that both sides were showing “mutual restraint.”

“Russia did all it could to leave calm and stability in Syria,” Mr. Kiselyov said. “Russia has now taken a pragmatic position.”

Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting from Berlin, and Alina Lobzina from London.

Syria’s Civil War: News and Analysis

• Al-Assad’s Soldiers: Syria’s new rulers say they will spare conscripts of Bashar al-Assad and pursue those who oversaw his regime’s abuses. Hundreds are lining up to learn which promise applies to them.
• Limits on Aid: Sanctions on the ousted Assad regime and other major obstacles could stymie Syria’s new leaders, threatening to exacerbate the humanitarian crisis that was set off by the civil war.
• Austin Tice’s Disappearance: For years, the United States has collected tips about the whereabouts of the American journalist who vanished in Syria’s gruesome prison system. The list is long.
• Netanyahu’s Visit: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with military officers in Israeli-controlled territory in Syria, according to his office. The trip highlighted Israel’s new presence across the de facto border with Syria.
• Putin Stays Silent: In an hourlong televised meeting with his top military brass, President Vladimir Putin of Russia left Syria unmentioned and made it clear that winning in Ukraine was his top priority.