When Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani toured Hmeimim airbase and Tartus port on 9 August, the images offered a striking reversal of the relationship Syria had known under Bashar Al-Assad.
In footage widely circulated after the visit, Syrian officials walked through facilities that had once embodied Moscow's dominance over its ally.
Under a new memorandum of understanding, Damascus will assume control of civilian facilities at Hmeimim and the commercial section of Tartus, while Russia's remaining military installations will be reorganised as joint training and capacity-building centres.
The agreement, reached after 18 months of negotiations, gives the two sides three months to complete the transition. Russian personnel will remain at the new centres, although neither government has disclosed their number or the precise military activities Moscow will be allowed to conduct.
For Damascus, the arrangement restores sovereignty over strategic infrastructure surrendered to Russia under Assad. For Moscow, however, it also avoids the outcome the Kremlin feared after Assad's fall in December 2024: losing Syria altogether.
What emerges is therefore a much smaller Russian presence, negotiated with rather than imposed on Damascus. Its importance, however, extends beyond Syria. Hmeimim and Tartus remain part of the infrastructure connecting Russia to the Mediterranean, Libya, and its expanding military presence in Africa.
From military bases to negotiated access
Russia’s intervention in Syria in 2015 transformed Hmeimim and Tartus into the backbone of its regional military posture. Hmeimim supported Russian air operations across Syria, while Tartus provided the navy with its only Mediterranean repair and replenishment facility.
Those privileges rested on agreements concluded with Assad that gave Moscow extraordinary freedom of operation. The new arrangement effectively replaces that relationship with one in which access depends on Syrian consent.
The military drawdown, however, began long before the August agreement. In the weeks after Assad’s fall, Russian forces withdrew from secondary positions around Manbij, Kobane, Palmyra and Qamishli, concentrating personnel and equipment at Hmeimim and Tartus before moving substantial quantities out of Syria.
By late January 2025, Russian cargo vessels were removing vehicles and other materiel accumulated at Tartus, while the last Russian submarine in the Mediterranean had already departed through Gibraltar on 2 January.
Major capabilities that had previously protected Russia’s Syrian deployment also disappeared. Anton Mardasov, a Russia and Syria specialist at the Middle East Institute, recently told The New Arab that Moscow had withdrawn almost all its major weapons systems by January 2025, including S-300 and S-400 air-defence systems.
The sequence matters. In mid-December, Russian aircraft, helicopters and fighters were still visible at Hmeimim, while S-300 and S-400 systems were being repositioned westwards as Moscow consolidated its remaining forces. Their subsequent withdrawal was therefore part of a progressive contraction rather than an immediate abandonment of Syria after Assad’s fall.
According to Nanar Hawach, a senior Syria analyst at the International Crisis Group, “the actual blow to Russia’s position happened with Assad's fall in December 2024, and everything since has reduced its presence to what Damascus is willing to host”.
The August memorandum formalises that transformation. Russia retains access, but the bases no longer provide the regional deterrence and freedom of action they once did.
Why Damascus still wants Moscow
The new Syrian government has little reason to restore Russia’s former position, but it also has little incentive to sever relations completely.
President Ahmed al-Sharaa has pursued that balance since taking power. During his first meetings with Russian officials in January 2025, he called for relations to address Moscow’s role in the Syrian war and respect Syrian sovereignty. Damascus has also demanded the extradition of Assad, who remains in Russia and was sentenced to death in absentia by a Syrian court on 11 August.
Yet al-Sharaa has visited Moscow twice, while Russian and Syrian delegations have continued discussing military cooperation, reconstruction and trade.
Russia retains leverage through areas in which replacing it quickly would be difficult. Syria's military still relies heavily on Soviet- and Russian-origin equipment, while Moscow remains an important supplier of wheat and energy.
Russian oil deliveries reportedly reached around 60,000 barrels per day by May, after Syria lost access to Iranian supplies following Assad’s fall. Russia has also supplied much of Syria’s imported wheat.
Damascus is already seeking alternatives. Syrian officials have reportedly told Washington that they are prepared to sharply reduce Russian oil imports as part of negotiations over Syria’s removal from the US state sponsors of terrorism list.
The same approach is visible at Tartus. Syria cancelled the Assad-era contract with Russian company STG Stroytransgaz to operate the commercial port in January 2025 and later signed an $800 million agreement with Dubai-based DP World.
But reducing dependence does not require excluding Moscow. Russian companies are discussing renewed commercial cooperation, and the Russian-Syrian Business Council is planning a business forum in November involving around 50 Russian companies, with sectors ranging from agriculture and energy to construction materials.
Russia’s realistic role may therefore be less about financing Syria's reconstruction than supplying commodities, maintaining Soviet-era infrastructure and military equipment, and offering services that Damascus can use while other partners enter the country.
A smaller footprint, from Syria to Libya
The transformation becomes clearer when Syria is viewed alongside Russia’s expanding position in Libya. As Russian forces contracted their Syrian deployment after Assad’s fall, transport aircraft began flying between Hmeimim and al-Khadim airbase in eastern Libya. An-124 and Il-76 aircraft were used in what appeared to be a substantial logistical transfer, while Russian activity also increased at other Libyan installations.
That network has since expanded. Russian personnel linked to the Africa Corps are now operating or developing infrastructure at al-Khadim, al-Jufra, al-Qardabiyah, Brak al-Shati, Tamanhint and Maaten al-Sarra. The latter, close to Chad and Sudan, gives Moscow a particularly useful staging point for operations further into Africa.
Libya is nevertheless an imperfect replacement for Syria. Its ports lack some of the infrastructure Russia enjoyed at Tartus, while access depends on local political relationships rather than sovereign Russian control.
This may explain the model now emerging. “Instead of having a naval air base in the eastern Mediterranean, Russia could end up with facilities for its fleet in Syria, at Tartus, and in Libya, for its air force,” Igor Delanoë, deputy director of the Franco-Russian Observatory, told The New Arab.
“This represents a lighter footprint, the very nature of which is both a strength and a weakness,” he said. Russia would face a lower political cost if it were forced out, but its access could also “easily be suspended or even terminated by the Syrian or Libyan side”.
The growing reliance on multiple access points also reflects the wider geography in which Moscow sees its Mediterranean presence. Laetitia Meenen, a researcher focusing on Russia’s relations with the Gulf and Middle East, argues that Tartus remains valuable because it sits along a broader route connecting the Black Sea and Mediterranean with the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.
“Tartus is a crucial military base for Russia, enabling it to project its naval power in the Mediterranean and beyond,” Meenen told The New Arab. “Russia is also seeking access to ports in the Red Sea, such as Port Sudan, to expand its influence.”
For Delanoë, Moscow is therefore likely to continue diversifying its support points, including through naval stopovers in Algeria and its long-running effort to secure access on Sudan's Red Sea coast.
Russia's Mediterranean presence is reduced, but not finished
That diversification has become more important because Russia's naval position in the Mediterranean has deteriorated dramatically. For the first time in more than a decade, Moscow currently lacks the permanently deployed combat force that characterised its Mediterranean posture after the intervention in Syria.
The Mediterranean Operational Squadron that once allowed Russia to shadow NATO deployments, sustain operations in Syria and maintain Kalibr-capable ships and submarines in the region has effectively disappeared.
Delanoë cautions against interpreting this as permanent. “The Russian naval presence has diminished but has not disappeared,” he told The New Arab, pointing to two constraints: Russia’s loss of control over Tartus and Turkey’s closure of the Turkish Straits to belligerent warships under the Montreux Convention since February 2022.
If the war in Ukraine ends and the Straits reopen, he expects Russian naval deployments to resume more regularly. “I believe the Mediterranean naval detachment will return, in one form or another,” Delanoë said, potentially combining a major surface combatant with nuclear and conventionally powered submarines and smaller missile or patrol vessels.
Until then, Russia appears to be prioritising access over permanent deployment. Tartus and Hmeimim can still facilitate military transit and links with Africa without sustaining the kind of force Moscow maintained under Assad.
This also makes Russia more dependent on governments that have their own reasons to bargain with it. For Damascus, retaining a limited Russian role provides another external relationship alongside Turkey, the Gulf states, Europe, and the United States. Russian participation in training the Syrian military could also give al-Sharaa another partner as Ankara expands its influence over Syria's security institutions.
For Moscow, meanwhile, even restricted access preserves something harder to rebuild once lost: the political and logistical infrastructure of a regional presence.
This infrastructure is political as much as military. Meenen argues that Moscow's ability to operate across this wider space depends on maintaining relationships with regional governments and avoiding disruptions along the routes connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea.
“Russia needs stability in the Middle East to secure its strategic interests, particularly regarding access to the Mediterranean and Red Sea,” she said.
Russia’s Syrian position is therefore unlikely to return to what it was before December 2024. Its air defence umbrella has gone, its Mediterranean squadron has disappeared, and the Syrian government now controls the terms under which Russian forces remain.
But Moscow’s wider regional strategy has not disappeared with them. It is becoming less concentrated in Syria and more dependent on a network stretching through Libya and Africa.
As Delanoë put it, Russia's future Mediterranean posture will continue to reflect “its projection of status and its claim to great-power stature,” while maintaining pressure on NATO’s southern flank and supporting relationships with countries including Algeria, Egypt and Libya.
The August agreement gives Moscow far less than it enjoyed under Assad. But after facing the possibility of losing Syria entirely, retaining Tartus and Hmeimim as part of that wider network is still a strategically useful outcome.
Francesco Salesio Schiavi is an Italian specialist in the Middle East. His focus lies in the security architecture of the Levant and the Gulf, with a particular emphasis on Iraq, Iran, and the Arab Peninsula, as well as military and diplomatic interventions by international actors
Follow him on X: @frencio_schiavi
Edited by Charlie Hoyle