The year’s end has witnessed a flurry of surprising developments in Syria and Ukraine, none of which favour Russia. Many of us woke up on the morning of 8 December in amazement to stories of the fall of President Assad. It was precipitated by the weakening of his traditional allies, with Russia focused on its war in Ukraine, Iran facing regional challenges, and Hezbollah neutered in Lebanon and the West Bank. For as long as I can remember, Damascus and Moscow have been friends. 

Syria first started buying large amounts of cheap Soviet weaponry just before the Suez Crisis in 1956, along with officials deployed to train and advise on their use, particularly on the Golan Heights, during the 1967 and 73 wars against Israel in which Red Army personnel are believed to have died. At one point, 70 percent of Syria’s GDP funded its army, spent on Soviet equipment. Officers of every grade attended Russian defence colleges, whilst until a few days ago the Al-Assad Military Academy at Aleppo hosted a significant staff handpicked by Moscow, since opening in 1979. Through it passed all infantry and tank corps conscripts of Syria’s 300,000-strong armed forces, with advanced training for engineers.

Relations were strengthened under the authoritarian Ba’athist presidents Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez al-Assad, who had signed an accord in 1971 allowing the old Soviet Union to take over part of the former Phoenician then Greco-Roman port of Tartus. Once a trading base of the Knights Templar, these days it is a thriving city of half a million on Syria’s coast. This was a far-sighted move by Moscow, who located its Fifth Mediterranean Squadron there as a Cold War counterbalance to the US Sixth Fleet, headquartered in Italy. In October 1980, a renewable Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation between the pair followed.

The Kremlin’s warm water armadas had long been looking for a home from which to influence and support regional friends and dominate the Suez Canal, in the periods when Egypt permitted access (it was closed for eight years from 1967-75). During this time, Leonid Brezhnev devised his global maritime strategy and tried to develop bilateral relations and port facilities with Prime Minister Dom Mintoff’s Malta and Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu in Ethiopia. Although Soviet warships visited Valetta after Britain’s departure in 1979, when in 1991 Mengistu fell from power and lost control of Eritrea and its strategic port of Massawa overlooking the Red Sea, interest in him waned. Meanwhile, the Soviet Navy had established maritime bases in the Egyptian ports of Alexandria and Mersa Matruh, but in 1977 chose to consolidate all their regional assets on the Syrian coast. 

Tartus effectively became the perpetual headquarters of the Soviet Mediterranean Fleet, removing any need to deploy from the Black Sea through the Dardanelles, under the eyes of NATO member Turkey. Over the years Russia has invested billions of roubles in dredging the harbour and developing an infrastructure, including an airbase, repair, storage and supply facilities for a large flotilla, making it a sought-after posting for Soviet naval personnel. Westerners considered it a “Red Portsmouth”, whilst a better parallel might be the ring-fenced US facility of Guantanamo, operating almost as a separate state within a third-party country, Cuba. 

A 1971 treaty, extended into the post-Soviet era, allows Russia to keep up to eleven warships at Tartus, including nuclear-armed vessels, though the port has typically berthed three frigates, a submarine, auxiliary ships, including oilers, and accommodated larger vessels, including assault ships, at floating piers. It is the Russian Federation’s only permanent base outside the former Soviet Union. There, matters rested until the events of the 2011 Arab Spring, when traditional governments of the Middle East tumbled like ninepins and for a while it looked as though the Syria of the Assads would follow suit. However, the brutal regime fought back, despite condemnation of many to Assad’s violent response, with both the Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation suspending Syria’s membership. In 2011 and 2012, Russia and China blocked Western-drafted Security Council resolutions and President Barack Obama described Assad’s potential use of chemical weapons against his own people as “a red line that would have enormous consequences and change my calculus” on potential American intervention. 

However, when in August 2013 the Syrians chanced their luck and crossed that line, Obama realised he had no appetite for direct military engagement, and Assad realised he had read the US president correctly. At the same time David Cameron’s coalition government put intervention in Syria to a vote in the House of Commons, which it lost by 285-272, ruling out joint US-UK kinetic action. The commander of a Royal Navy submarine, poised to launch cruise missiles at a selection of regime targets, listened to the Commons debate via BBC Radio and on hearing its result, perhaps for the first time in history knew in advance what his orders would be, ahead of them arriving.

With both Western nations surrendering any willingness to help the anti-Assad forces, they effectively signalled to the dictator that he could carry on with his murderous civil war. From 2015, Russian forces joined Assad’s side, enabling the Syrian leader to retake objectives like the city of Aleppo, which fell after months of relentless aerial bombardment, an action widely celebrated in Moscow, with the Kremlin’s elite eager to claim credit for the military success. “There is no question that liberating Aleppo from radical groups was done with the direct involvement, even decisive influence, of our service personnel,” Vladimir Putin crowed afterwards. Yet, with an estimated 90 percent of Syria’s population living below the poverty line or in Jordanian and other refugee camps, regime support remained limited. 

Through a bilateral treaty of August 2015, Moscow also began construction of its Khmeimim air base at Latakia, adjacent to the Bassel Al-Assad International Airport, near the coast and 200 miles north of Tartus. Designed as the strategic centre of Russia’s aerial presence in the region, it also hosted top secret listening and surveillance equipment, and from here air sorties against rebel positions were launched. Capable of handling every type of Russian Federation airframe, plus ground forces including tanks, it has accommodation for thousands. Russia has free use of this facility with no time limit, whilst personnel and all family members inside are treated as diplomats. Latakia’s garrison was also tasked with training the estimated 50,000 troops of Syria’s air defence command at its 130 anti-aircraft sites, and on its cutting-edge Buk-M2 and SA-22 missiles and radar systems. 

Coming soon after interventions in the Donbas and Crimea, Moscow’s 2015 military activity in Syria marked the beginning of a more assertive foreign policy, with Putin advertising to the West that he was “reclaiming his place as a dominant player on the world stage”. Russia’s prolonged overseas campaign was the first since Afghanistan, and its involvement altered domestic fortunes in a civil war that had stagnated for years. At excessive cost in Syrian lives, Russian airpower restored momentum to Damascus and pushed US-backed rebels into retreat. It proved to be a gamechanger and allowed Putin to claim the world status he’d sought since coming to power in 2000. Subsequently, Russian and Syrian forces held joint manoeuvres, with Moscow even treating missions against rebel-held positions as training exercises in the run up to invading Ukraine in 2022.

On the Kremlin’s behalf, the late, unlamented Yevgeny Prigozhin and his paramilitary Wagner group not only started participating in ground operations but also forged ties with Syria’s business elite, which allowed Moscow to minimise its own overt military involvement and deny any casualties incurred in the conflict. A symbiotic trading relationship grew up between the nations, with Moscow as a vital supplier of wheat, essential for Syria’s food security, while Damascus exported agricultural products, textiles, and minerals. More significantly, Russia invested heavily in Assad’s energy infrastructure, recognising his country’s value as an oil and gas transport hub rather than a supplier. 

Thus, any third party wishing to ship petroleum products via the wider network of Middle Eastern pipelines to Syria’s ports was forced to consider Russia, minimising competition from Iran, Iraq, Qatar, or Saudi Arabia. Now new stability in Syria might allow revival of a long-dormant pipeline project to connect Qatari natural gas fields with Turkey via Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria, which had been rejected by the Assad regime to protect Russian gas exports into European markets.

Military contracts with Moscow and Wagner had been running at anything up to over $4 billion, which Syria could never repay. Instead, Russia periodically cancelled the debt and substituted a new agreement to supply more modern equipment. This playbook, using the same interrelated array of political, military and economic tactics to prop up regional warlords, has since been implemented in nearly a dozen African nations, from Algeria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Mali, Zambia and Mozambique to the Central African Republic, Niger, Sudan, Eritrea and Libya. Latakia, the equivalent of RAF Brize Norton or the US Ramstein Airbase in Germany, has been crucial to this extension of power, for through it all Russian forces and equipment deployed by air to African states, were sustained whilst there, then withdrew the same way. Now all of that is in danger.

When Russia shifted its military focus and resources to the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin sought to preserve the status quo in Syria with minimal effort and a force rarely exceeding 5,000 troops, plus a hollowed-out air detachment and air defence missile system. Following Prigozhin’s demise in the summer of 2023, up to 2,000 of his battle-hardened mercenaries were also transferred out of Syria, some joining Wagner’s African Legion, these days a deniable arm of Russia’s defence ministry. 

Assad’s collapse has come as a reputational blow to Russia, not only his fall itself, but also its swiftness. Seemingly unimaginable weeks ago, the Syrian civil war lasted thirteen long years but ended in as many days. On 27 November, the coalition of opposition forces based in Idlib province and known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) announced their first major undertaking for ages, Operation Deter Aggression. Within days, they had swept through Syria’s second city of Aleppo, then Hama and Homs. By December 8th they had taken Damascus and sent the extended Assad family scuttling to the safety of Moscow, where it had already created an extensive property portfolio. Other family members have salted away billions across Europe, via anonymous trusts in Guernsey. The speed was remarkable, with the rebel alliance taking barely two weeks to completely undermine decades of Russian defence investment and engagement. 

The fall of Syria not only came as a huge surprise to its HTS perpetrators, but also to Russia’s elite, whose media statements betray their bewilderment and gloom. For they are petrified that something similar might be replicated in their seized Crimean and Donbas regions, as well as other contested areas of eastern Ukraine, where the escalating costs of Russian blood and money far exceed anything invested in Syria or earlier in Afghanistan. Although fought with the same weapons, and sometimes the same personnel, the two fronts, Syria and Ukraine, have been very different for Moscow. Fighting rebels in dusty Syria has amounted to a series of low intensity encounters, mostly for Russia’s Air Force, requiring little imagination. 

In Ukraine, Moscow’s forces have consistently been on the back foot, faced with the fury of Ukraine fighting for its survival, and forcing the pace of innovation. In recent days, reports have surfaced of a fully-automated attack on Russian positions near the village of Lyptsi in the Kharkiv region by Ukraine’s 13th National Guard Typhoon Detachment, which only operates unmanned equipment. The assault utilised both airborne killer drones (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, UAV) and dozens of uncrewed ground combat vehicles (UGV) undertaking surveillance, mine clearing and operating 12.7mm (0.50-inch) heavy machine guns. This wasn’t the launch of Hollywood’s Skynet, for each required a human operator, but illustrates that 21st century combat is transforming, as Australia’s thoughtful Major General Mick Ryan argues.

Lyptsi will go down in the annals of warfare. It was tentative, for the Ukrainians had to overcome a lack of air-ground autonomous doctrine, the challenges of navigation and crossing many forms of terrain for their UGV, and the huge amounts of on-board power each device consumes when traversing difficult ground at consistent speed. Deconfliction between each UGV and UAV by operators limited to cameras miles away would have been another challenge, in a week when the guided missile cruiser USS Gettysburg managed to shoot down a friendly F/A 18 Hornet flying off the USS Harry S. Truman in the Gulf. Therefore, human confidence that the little electronic brains of remote systems will perform as designed might also affect their development. Additional concerns abound that they only assault the enemy and not their operators, friendly robots, or that communications between mankind and machine cannot be subverted by the opposition. 

Yet, the expendability of UGVs makes them very attractive in Kyiv’s casualty-rich environment, which The Economist estimates has so far cost Kyiv between 60,000-100,000 killed, plus 400,000 wounded. Moscow is under similar pressure, with the UK Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, recently asserting, “Russia is about to suffer 700,000 people killed or wounded — the enormous pain and suffering that the Russian nation is having to bear because of Putin’s ambition.” Hence, we now know Moscow has also been trialling their own UGVs for armed reconnaissance and sentry missions as well as casualty evacuation. 

Behind the scenes, all Western armies are belatedly following suit to a massively revised timetable. Lyptsi will cause a huge realignment of spending on human-machine learning, with an equal impact on budgets for military training, education, leadership development, tactics, organisational structures, and procurement. In this sense, the British government’s reluctance to increase defence spending to a paltry 2.5 percent immediately looks like being overtaken by events. Lyptsi will prove to be a dawn-of-gunpowder event, a Cambrai moment (the innovative 1917 tank battle), which I predict will soon dictate a leap of defence spending across NATO nations to 5 percent, as President-elect Trump advocates. 

Most of Putin’s people cannot deny their presence in Ukraine is overwhelmingly rejected by the locals and persists only by heartless suppression or outright destruction of entire settlements, a tactic that Assad and Putin employed in Syria. For now, there are long queues of Russian mobile assets jostling for evacuation from Latakia airbase and the fleet from Tartus has departed and is currently anchored off the coast, waiting for events to unfold. 

… in Russia everyone is aware that both the Syrian deployment and Ukrainian war were Putin’s choices

The Syrian setback is affecting Putin and his quintet of siloviki super-elite, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, foreign intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin, former secretary of Russia’s security council, Nikolai Patrushev, chief executive of Rosneft, Igor Sechin, and former defence minister Sergei Shoigu, who will be interpreting the fall of Damascus in terms of the continuity of their own power. Because their leaders tend to be inflexible, dictatorships are fragile affairs, and in Russia everyone is aware that both the Syrian deployment and Ukrainian war were Putin’s choices. 

Both have proved monumental disasters, not only for the poor who have perished in droves, but even for the wealthy who have seen their favourite Western brands disappear from shops, travel restricted, international trade frozen and the rouble plunge in value. They must fear that what has just happened in Syria could be repeated nearer to home, with the same shock and speed. The assassination on the streets of Moscow of General Igor Kirillov, in charge of Russia’s military’s nuclear and chemical weapons protection forces, and sanctioned for using chemical weapons in Ukraine, can only make Putin’s pals even more nervous. His death, by remotely-detonated scooter, is another aspect of the robot wars seen at Lyptsi. I am sure that weaponised Tesla automobiles will follow. It advertises that the elite in Russia are equally vulnerable, either from the long reach of Zelensky’s SBU, or Putin’s own FSB. 

Why did Assad’s Syria suddenly collapse? It was partly the simultaneous distraction or weakness of each of his international backers, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah. Another aspect was that the fervour of his Alawite minority rule via sadistic repression was also exhausted. Though comprising a little above five percent of the country, Alawites, a splinter faith of Islaam, had run most government offices, the security services and the army under the Assads. Such weariness was exactly how the Third Reich in 1945 and Communist regimes of the former Eastern bloc in 1989-90, particularly in Poland, East Germany and Romania, tumbled, bringing down their leaders. After decades of surviving on their own savagery, involving mass murder, detention and torture, Assad’s acolytes and their militias simply melted away; there was no last stand by the Republican Guard or other loyalist forces. 

The similarity to the 1918 implosion of the Ottoman Empire or collapse of the government of Saddam Hussein in 2003 in the same region is even more striking. I’m sure that HTS itself anticipated no such success. Bringing down the regime, entering the ruling family’s properties, looting the presidential lavatories, tearing down their statues, or forming an administration were well outside their expectations.

For now, HTS’s leader, Abu Muhammad al-Julani, is desperately trying to de-radicalise his own image, though question marks remain about his earlier years in leading HTS’s forerunner, Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaida affiliate. Born in 1982 as Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa in Riyadh to a Syrian family from the Golan Heights, shortly before the 2003 invasion of Iraq he joined al-Qaeda in Iraq and fought for three years before being captured and imprisoned by US forces between 2006 to 2011. Julani has ruled Idlib since mid-2017, collecting taxes, providing basic social services, imposing conservative legislation, but has demonstrated greater restraint, competence and discipline than most in the region. To make his presence acceptable outside his own state, he has currently imposed a twelve-hour curfew to prevent disorder and clamped down on the looting and criminality that was so evident in Saddam’s 2003 fall in Iraq. The international jury is out. Neither Moscow nor Washington DC know what to make of the new man in Damascus.

Meanwhile, HTS supporters have stormed the notorious Saydnaya military prison and death camp north of Damascus, released hundreds of political prisoners and begun to look for the thousands of “disappeared”, foreigners included, whose only crime was to disagree with Assad. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), an organisation based in Britain that tracks the conflict in their native land, has estimated that over 30,000 detainees were killed in regime prisons, plus a total of 500,000 fatalities incurred in the civil war from March 2011. Mass graves in Najha, on the edge of the capital, are beginning to be uncovered. 

However, HTS has not subdued all of Syria, which remains a tense multi-sectarian jigsaw-puzzle of Sunni, Alawite, Druze, Christian, Arab, Kurd, Turkmen, Yazidi, and some Islamic State actors, controlling oft-conflicting militias, ranging from the secular to fervent fundamentalist. Keeping neighbouring powers at bay whilst healing decades of internecine fighting and forging a single, unifying, nationalist vision may prove beyond anyone. Yet, it is probably best that Syria determines its own future. Too many outsiders, from the cartographical efforts of Messrs Sykes and Picot in 1916 onwards, have tried to shape this troubled region that has no natural frontiers. 

Russia’s dreams of global reach are shattered, and with it Vladimir Putin may find his own position fatally undermined

Even today, Turkey in the north and Israel to the south are taking advantage of the power vacuum to settle old scores and eliminate future threats. In a spectacular series of air strikes, for example, Israel has destroyed Syria’s air force and navy, bringing military dominance to a region of which Binyamin Netanyahu could only have dreamt, even weeks before. Of interest to Europe are the reportedly nine million refugees who live outside Syria’s borders. Many of the departed fled their homeland for other countries as illegal migrants, which is why the nation’s future stability concerns us all. Only peace will encourage the diaspora to return and stop more from leaving.

Make no mistake, we have barely begun to see the ripples spreading out from this regime change in Syria, which is also a huge personal blow to Vladimir Putin, and a scenario that President-elect Donald Trump cannot alter in any way, whether or not he would wish to. For over fifty years Damascus and Moscow have been partners. Now the Kremlin feels obliged to negotiate with HTS, the very group who overthrew their friend from power, in a desperate bid to retain their Syrian energy investments and control of Latakia and Tartus. Without these two military bases, Russia’s dreams of global reach are shattered, and with it Vladimir Putin may find his own position fatally undermined.