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Russia maintains key naval and air bases that it uses as staging points in the Mediterranean and Africa, even as it withdraws its forces from smaller sites in Syria after the overthrow of its ally Bashar al-Assad.
Satellite images reviewed on Tuesday showed no signs of a Russian withdrawal from the Tartus naval base or the Hmeimim air base near Latakia, both on Syria's western coast.
These facilities were crucial to enabling the Kremlin to support the now-fallen Assad regime in Syria Syrian Civil WarBut it also serves as a key logistical bridge for Russia in the south.
The Kremlin said that the future of its bases in Syria will depend on negotiations with the new authorities after the overthrow of the Assad regime by opposition forces led by the Islamic group Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham.
Assad fled the country on Sunday after Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham took control of the Syrian capital, Damascus, and was granted asylum in Russia by President Vladimir Putin.
Losing bases in Syria could be costly Russia A permanent presence of its naval forces in the Mediterranean, as well as a stopping point for operations in Africa, said Pavel Luzhin, a visiting scholar at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
The Ilyushin Il-76, Russia's primary Soviet-era heavy transport aircraft, has a flight range of 4,200 kilometers with a medium payload. Without access to a Syrian base, Russian forces will need to use one or perhaps several other airfields to conduct long-range operations.
“It is clear that Russia wants to maintain at least a symbolic presence in these bases, so its defeat does not seem so obvious. But whether or not this happens depends on how the political process in Syria itself develops,” Luzhin said.
Putin's overwhelming focus on his invasion of Ukraine has diminished Russia's capacity in Syria, leading some prominent hardline voices to reluctantly accept Moscow's loss of influence in the region.
“What are you going to do, are you going to pull your hair out?” Andrei Medvedev, a well-known Russian state TV presenter, wrote on the social media app Telegram. He added: “It is clear that if we lose the bases in Syria, we lose Africa. It would be almost impossible to transport goods by air to the Central African Republic or Mali. . . Well, we'll develop Siberia instead.
While satellite images and transponder movement reveal heavy aircraft traffic to Hmeimim over the past week, analysts say the pace of arrivals and departures is not consistent with a hasty departure. No ships arrived in Tartous to enable the sea evacuation of equipment or personnel.
“A strong indicator of change is the number of Ilyushin and Antonov planes passing through. If they have to leave Tartus, you will actually see more ships showing up to help move things,” said Dara Massicot, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “There's an evacuation, we'll know about it.”
Satellite images on Monday revealed the departure of two Russian frigates, a submarine and a support ship, which were previously photographed in the port of Tartus on December 6. But images taken by Planet Labs and NASA show ships matching their size, maintaining positions about 8 to 10 kilometers offshore.
A ship similar in size to one of the frigates can be seen in a similar location in a cloud-obscured image taken by the European Space Agency on Tuesday morning.
“The Russians don’t want to get hit, so they drag them out to loiter at sea,” Massicot said, noting that the ships had been moved out of range of mortar fire.
If Russia decides to evacuate its naval presence, the Turkish government will likely prevent ships from crossing into the Black Sea through the Bosphorus Strait. In such a case, the nearest Russian base would be Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea, a long sea journey that includes refueling on a route surrounded by NATO countries.
Cartography by Stephen Bernard
