Russian President Vladimir Putin may decide to leave military forces in Syria “for quite some time,” Moscow’s top diplomat said Friday.
“We do not like artificial deadlines, but we have been consistently reducing our military presence in Syria,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Channel 4 News, a British-based outlet.
In 2015, Putin intervened in Syria on behalf of President Bashar Assad’s regime, which was on the brink of being overthrown. The Russians described the intervention in terms of counter-terrorism, but targeted their initial airstrikes on U.S.-backed rebel groups hostile to Assad. The American-led coalition meanwhile prioritized the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Lavrov said some terrorist “leftovers” still need to be destroyed, before hinting at a longer-term commitment.
“Besides, we do have, not actually full-fledged bases, but two places where our naval ships and our aircraft are located in Syria and they might be usefully kept for quite some time,” he said.
The Syrian civil war transformed into one of the most complicated conflicts in the world, featuring a tangle of terrorist cells and rebel groups, as well as the Assad regime, which all received various forms of outside aid. But the civil war also had a larger geopolitical significance, as Russia and Iran deployed to the country to secure Assad. Syria provides Russia with its only naval base in the Mediterranean, while Iran sought to expand its military presence on Israel’s borders.
“The Russian involvement in Syria [took place] on the basis of legitimate request from the legitimate government,” Lavrov said.
And he downplayed the significance of Assad’s use of chemical weapons. “What I want to say is: It is a war,” he told Channel 4. “It is the war, which was started by mistakes made on the part of everyone, including the Syrian government. I believe these disturbances could have been handled politically at an earlier stage.”
Lavrov emphasized the impersonal nature of Putin’s support for Assad. “We do not like anybody,” he said. “The diplomacy and politics are not about liking or disliking, it is for human beings as individuals to use this terminology. President Assad is protecting the sovereignty of his country. He is protecting his country and in a broader sense the region from terrorism, which was really about a couple of weeks from taking over Damascus in September 2015.”
Russia has cited Assad’s invitation to justify its intervention while calling for the United States to withdraw from the country.
“We have now on our hands what is the result of outside forces having tried to use the situation in order to reshape the map of the Middle East and Northern Africa by trying to get into Syria without any invitation and trying to promote their own agenda there,” Lavrov said.
