Between the fall of Aleppo to the opposition on November 30 and that of Hama on December 5, the Syrian port of Tartous experienced unusual activity. All the Russian warships moored there set sail one after the other, including three frigates and a Kilo-class attack submarine. On December 8, after a brief return to the dock, they packed up again, as civilian satellites showed. Supposedly “in exercises”, will they come back one day? Nothing is less certain: Bashar el-Assad fled to Moscow, and in Tartous, the statue of his father, Hafez el-Assad, was broken by the crowd.
For Vladimir Putin, the collapse of the bloodthirsty regime of the Assad family (500,000 deaths during the civil war) is a catastrophe. In exchange for his participation in the repression of the revolution born during the Arab Spring, he was able to install, in the northwest of Syria, two large military bases, now on hold, Hmeimim and Tartous – and dozens of bases and posts advances. They played, until recently, a crucial role in Russian foreign policy. Their loss could undermine the Kremlin’s military capabilities in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Africa.
Moscow assures that contacts have been made with the Islamists of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTC), who now control a large part of the areas previously held by loyalist forces. Putin could well seek to curry favor with them by offering them strong rewards in exchange for maintaining Russian establishment. But it is not certain that the new masters of the country will allow it to stay: it is from Hmeimim that the Russian army has carried out merciless bombing campaigns on rebel areas, not hesitating to strike civilian populations. . And the last of its kind dates back to just the beginning of December, just before the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
Russia’s African adventure began in Syria
Hmeimim Air Base is located southeast of the port city of Latakia. The Russian army took a permanent foothold there in 2015. In record time, it built a second runway there, to complete the pre-existing airfield, and set up air control and other air defense structures. . The S-300 and S-400 systems installed there have a range to reach Turkey, Cyprus, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel.
“In September 2019, more than thirty planes (Su-35, Su-34 and Su-24) and helicopters (Mi-35 and Mi-8) were deployed there, noted a report of two French deputies, tabled a few days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Thanks to the expansion of this base carried out in July 2020, Russia even deployed its TU-22M3 supersonic bombers in May 2021.” It was also used as a training platform for pilots of its aerospace forces, the VKS.
The Hmeimim base also served as a resupply hub for Wagner’s mercenaries and their aircraft, to conduct their operations in Africa. “The African adventure began from the moment Syria opened its doors to Russia, recalls a French military source. Without such a point of support, with the agreement of a State, its logistical lines of equipment military will be complicated, even cut. Even its wide-body aircraft do not go directly to the Central African Republic, Mali or elsewhere in Africa. If the base closes, the coup regimes in the Sahel could see the military support of their Russian allies diminished.
In the meantime, priority should go to the evacuation of personnel and heavy equipment from Syria, which could, if all goes well, take several weeks or months. This “would require hundreds of sorties of IL-76 and An-124 [des avions de transport]and not the handful of identified aircraft, explains on X Dara Massicotresearcher at the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace. When Russian forces deployed to Syria in 2015, they carried out nearly 300 sorties in two weeks, before the base was expanded.” The Kremlin is walking on a tightrope: if its troops have to leave overnight The next day, they will not be able to repatriate all their equipment, not to mention the thousands of men.
Warm Seas Access Project
It will also not necessarily be easy to evacuate the Tartous naval base, where there are ground-to-air devices. Russia feels all the more at home there as it built this hold in the 1970s after an agreement with Hafez el-Assad, before abandoning it after the end of the USSR. The Russian intervention of 2015 allowed the Kremlin to reinvest it and even obtain management of the base for half a century.
Thanks to this agreement, Putin carried out a project, carried out during the time of the tsars, of permanent access to warm seas. To redevelop the necessary docks and infrastructure, Russia has invested billions in the port of Tartous, its only point of support in the Eastern Mediterranean. This profoundly changed the nature of naval operations in the sector. Russian forces and the NATO fleet have since continued to monitor and measure each other. In the air – Russian Hmeimim planes carrying out intimidation flights near Western ships – or on and in the seas.
Vladimir Putin could be forced to reduce the number of his boats in the area, to the great satisfaction of NATO. Unless a friendly power agrees to welcome them. But between authorizing a Russian warship to stop at a port and allowing Moscow to set up a base, there is a step that countries like Algeria and Egypt, or even Libya, should avoid. for its part under the control of Marshal Haftar. Even if it were to open its port of Tobruk to Russia, the docks are far from being able to accommodate as many ships as the base in Tartous.
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