By Kontur and AFP | 2024-12-09

KYIV -- Authorities in Kyiv December 8 welcomed the ouster of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, linking the fall of the regime to its reliance on Moscow, whose military is mired in the Ukraine war.

Kyiv, fighting a Russian invasion for almost three years, said it hoped to restore diplomatic relations with Damascus and called for an end to Moscow's military presence in Syria.

Russia has strategically valuable army and naval bases in the country, where it launched a military intervention on the side of al-Assad in 2015.

Two years later, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that Moscow had accomplished its mission in Syria's civil war, and that Russia was there to stay.

"If the terrorists raise their heads again, we will deal unprecedented strikes unlike anything they have seen," he said December 11, 2017.

But as the rebels, dominated by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group, swept across Syria in recent weeks with the goal of toppling Russia's main ally in the Middle East, those "unprecedented" strikes failed to materialize.

The cost of war

Moscow's war effort in Ukraine has drained its ability to support Syria, analysts and Ukrainian officials said.

In February 2023, then-UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace estimated that "97% of the Russian army, the whole Russian army, is in Ukraine."

"If 97% of the Russian army is now committed to Ukraine, with an attrition rate very, very high, and potentially their combat effectiveness depleted by 40%, and nearly two thirds of their tanks destroyed or broken, that has a direct impact on the security of Europe," he said.

"Our involvement over there had a cost," Anton Mardasov, a Moscow-based analyst focusing on the Middle East, told The New York Times in a December 8 story, referring to Russia's war in Ukraine. "The cost was Syria."

Al-Assad's decades of rule turned "Syria into a pariah state that relied on protection and support of other dictatorships," Ukraine's Foreign Ministry said in a statement December 8.

His ouster "will also significantly weaken the expansionism of Russia, which for years has used the Syrian territory, its resources and people as a foothold to spread its destructive influence in the Middle East, to destabilize regional stability and security, and to create hotbeds of threat for Syria's neighboring states," it said.

"Assad has fallen," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said on X. "This is how it has always been and will always be for dictators who bet on Putin. He always betrays those who rely on him."

"The main goal now is to restore security in Syria and effectively protect its people from violence," he said, reiterating Ukraine's "support for the Syrian people."

The "long-term security of Syria depends on the end of the Russian presence in that country," the ministry said.

Al-Assad was one of the few leaders who recognized Russia's annexation of Ukraine's four eastern and southern regions in 2022. Kyiv responded by severing diplomatic ties with Damascus.

'Unreliable partners'

A Kremlin source told Russian news agencies December 8 that al-Assad and his family were in Moscow.

But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov December 9 refused to confirm the reports.

"As for Mr. Assad's whereabouts, I've got nothing to tell you," he told reporters, adding that if Russia granted asylum to al-Assad and his family, it would be a decision taken by Putin.

Russia has sheltered several ousted leaders.

After Ukraine overthrew the Moscow-backed regime in 2014, Russia took in former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said al-Assad's ouster showed that Russia and its allies can be defeated.

The European Union (EU) and NATO member serves as a crucial logistics hub for Western military aid to Kyiv.

"The events in Syria have made the world realise once again, or at least they should, that even the most cruel regime may fall and that Russia and its allies can be defeated," Tusk said on X.

"Russia and Iran were the main backers of the Assad regime, and they share the responsibility for the crimes committed against the Syrian people," said NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.

"They also proved to be unreliable partners, abandoning Assad when he ceased to be of use to them."

"The end of Assad's dictatorship is a positive and long-awaited development," the EU's top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said on X. "It also shows the weakness of Assad's backers, Russia and Iran."

'No time for Syria'

"What good is Russia as a partner if it cannot save its oldest client in the Middle East from a ragtag band of militias?" asked Eugene Rumer, the director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

"Besides the operational setback, it is also a diplomatic and reputational blow."

The rebel victory, he told The New York Times, has become "part of the price they are paying for the war in Ukraine."

"The priorities totally changed," said Russian journalist Denis Korotkov. "There was no time for Syria."