Russia never used the full potential of the Tartus naval base in Syria, and never will

Syria and Russia reached a memorandum of understanding in early August on the future of Russia’s access to the strategic Tartus coastal naval and Hmeimim air bases. While Russia will continue to maintain conditional access in the future, the days of largely controlling these sites as overseas military bases are over for good. In retrospect, Moscow never realized the full strategic potential of its access to Tartus, which dates back to the early 1970s.

Syria announced the memorandum on August 9, saying it was the culmination of some 18 months of negotiations led by the Foreign Ministry.

“The memorandum provides for state management of civil facilities, including Hmeimim airport and the fourth commercial dock in Tartus port, gradually placing them under civil administration,” the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency reported on August 10. The takeover of Tartus, the SANA report outlined, “is intended to boost the port’s operational capacity, accelerate cargo handling and relieve pressure on other berths.”

Additionally, military facilities at the site will be converted to training centers after a three-month transition process. So while Russian troops can stay, they will do so under terms decided by Damascus, a complete reversal of the privileged arrangement Moscow enjoyed before December 2024, including legal immunity for Russian troops and their families. Gone are the days when Russian President Vladimir Putin could summon his Syrian counterpart from the presidential palace in Damascus to Hmeimim to meet with him. On one such surprise visit in December 2017, a Russian soldier physically prevented Assad from following the Russian leader in a degrading reminder of who was boss in that relationship. Today, it is the Russian soldiers left in Syria who follow their hosts’ rules.

“The deal does not mean a complete Russian withdrawal from Syria,” said Ibrahim Hamidi, editor-in-chief of the Saudi-owned Al Majalla newspaper. “But as announced, it does mark the end of the ‘Russian bases’ model established under the Assad regime and a transition to a new Russian presence regulated in accordance with the new Syrian government.”

The Indian newspaper The Sunday Guardian was much more scathing. “If you remove the diplomatic language, the meaning becomes quite clear: Russia no longer has its own military bases in Syria,” wrote John Dobson. “It will maintain its presence in some repurposed and jointly managed form, but the era in which Moscow operated Tartus and Hmeimim as autonomous Russian military outposts is over.”

Previously, Russia enjoyed unrestricted access to these strategic bases when Assad ruled the country. The Syrian dictator made unprecedented concessions to Moscow in the form of a 49-year lease in the late 2010s. The Russian military helped prop up his brutal regime during the bloody Syrian civil war, in which it intervened directly in September 2015. Hmeimin served as a hub for Syrian warplanes that repeatedly bombed anti-Assad opposition groups, killing several civilians and destroying large parts of the infrastructure in the process. of Syria, including hospitals and medical facilities. Tartus served as a logistics center for Russian warships operating in the Mediterranean Sea. Beyond giving Russia a foothold and a warm-water port, these bases were also vital to sustaining and resupplying its military and paramilitary operations in Africa.

That privileged position appeared to be in danger when Assad’s enemy, Ahmed al-Sharaa, led a lightning offensive in late November 2024, culminating in the capture of Damascus on December 8. Assad fled to his new life in ignominious exile in Moscow, evacuated by plane from Hmeimim. Russia quickly moved from bombing Sharaa’s forces when he led the armed Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to embracing him as Assad’s successor. Shortly thereafter it withdrew most of its strategic weapons, including its long-range S-400 missile systems, from the bases, but continued negotiations with the new Sharaa government over its future status, hoping to preserve some foothold. In early 2025, Hmeimim and Tartus were a shadow of their former selves. The remaining Russian troops in Syria were subject to the whim of the new government in Damascus regarding access and even security, given the precarious and “basically defenseless” position they now found themselves in in the new post-Assad Syria. Still, they were held, even during the sectarian violence that terrorized the coastal region around them in March, leaving thousands of Alawites dead in their wake.

Moscow and Damascus spent months negotiating the future status of Hmeimim and Tartus. In October 2025, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested they could serve as “humanitarian hubs to send humanitarian shipments” to Africa, where Russia still has strategic interests. The following June, Russia revealed that it was in talks about a “possible reformatting” of the bases. This came shortly after Moscow made its first resupply shipment by ship to Tartus since Assad’s departure. Then, on August 9, the memorandum of understanding finally determined its post-Assad fate. Arguably, it could have been worse, as Syria’s new rulers decided to expel the Russians entirely in revenge for all their comrades and civilians that Russian warplanes killed during those nine years, from September 2015 to December 2024. In the end, they chose a more pragmatic solution, aware that there are benefits to cooperating with Russia and that the post-Assad period and Moscow’s weakened position since it invaded Ukraine presented the opportunity for a more equitable and pragmatic partnership.

While Russia established Hmeimim by converting a civilian airport for its intervention in Syria 11 years ago, its use of Tartus dates back much further than 1971, when Moscow established a naval support facility there through the Soviet-Syrian lease agreement of 1971. Moscow lost access to Alexandria, Mersa Matruh and Port Said in Egypt during that decade, making Tartus essential to sustaining and supporting Soviet naval operations in the Mediterranean. He moved his fleet’s repair and support equipment from Alexandria to Tartus. As early as 1976, the CIA noted problems in Soviet-Syrian relations, including “Syrian resistance to Soviet attempts to obtain greater use of Syrian port facilities.”

The 1980s marked the peak of Soviet arms sales and military aid to Damascus, which Moscow had long generously provided in exchange for access to Tartus.

In 1988, Reagan administration officials claimed that the Soviet Union was expanding Tartus as a hub to maintain its fleet in the Mediterranean. In a report to Congress, then-National Security Agency director Rear Admiral William Studeman noted that reliable access to Tartus “would avoid the need for frequent naval transit to home ports on the Black Sea” for Moscow. “It would allow longer deployments and a greater Soviet presence in an area of ​​considerable political-military volatility,” he said. Interestingly, he also noted “speculation that the Soviet-Syrian agreement will establish Soviet sovereignty over the facility” and assessed that “it is highly unlikely that Syria will or could make such concessions to any foreign power.”

In a peculiar incident in April 1989, two Syrian helicopters fired on Soviet ships 35 miles off Tartus, killing and wounding a small number of their crews. Pilot error was blamed. Damascus apologized.

The following year, after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait and sparked a crisis in the Persian Gulf, a flurry of Soviet naval activity was reported in Tartus. It reportedly coincided with a secret agreement with Damascus to convert part of Tartus into a Soviet naval base “out of reach of the Syrians.” However, Tartus was unwilling to become a major center for an expanded Soviet naval presence in the Mediterranean. The Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991 and its successor, the Russian Federation, did not use Tartus for many years.

The 720th Logistics Support Point for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet remained disused until the mid-2000s, when Moscow signaled it was seeking to reestablish a permanent naval presence in the Mediterranean, raising eyebrows in the United States and Israel. “By increasing Syria’s weight in the region, analysts say such a move could further complicate Western attempts to secure settlements in Lebanon and Palestine,” noted a 2007 analysis in The Guardian. “Defensive missile and surveillance systems around any Russian installations could also shift the military balance to Israel’s disadvantage.”

In 2010, Russia had only two bases abroad: one in Sevastopol, Ukraine, on the Black Sea, and, of course, Tartus, which remained the only base outside the territories of the former Soviet Union. In January 2010, Moscow said it intended to modernize the Tartus facilities by 2011. That year’s Arab Spring reached Syria and Bashar al-Assad violently cracked down on peaceful protesters. Syria fell into a violent civil war in 2012. That same year, Russia sent two amphibious assault ships to Tartus in a move interpreted by analysts at the time as a “demonstration of power.” While Russia would not intervene militarily in the civil war for another three years, it wanted to avoid the embarrassment of the facility being overrun by the anti-Assad opposition.

After intervening in 2015, deploying advanced fighter jets and S-400 air defenses, a beleaguered Bashar al-Assad found his regime far more indebted and dependent on Moscow than ever under the rule of his father Hafez al-Assad. He gave many more concessions on Tartus and Hmeimim, exemplified by the generous 49-year lease, with optional 25-year extensions, granted in 2017 and legal immunities for Russian personnel, who had bombed countless hospitals across the country. The agreement also allowed Russia to dredge Tartus and install floating berths to support larger warships, including nuclear-powered ones. These improvements could one day allow the port to host up to 11 Russian warships. Russian military analyst Igor Korotchenko described the strategic potential of an expanded base there. “If our new surface combat ships and submarines equipped with Kalibr cruise missiles are based in Tartus, this will allow Moscow to keep the situation in the Middle East and the Mediterranean under control,” he told Russian state newspaper Sputnik News.

Russia also wanted to separate the Hmeimim air base from the adjacent Bassel Al-Assad civilian airport, as it planned to remain there for the next few years. Additionally, in 2020, Putin signed a directive to “negotiate with Syria on the transfer of more real estate and water territory to the possession of the Russian military.”

In the end, these great plans came to nothing. Russia’s fateful large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 saw it reduce military resources, including those in Syria, for that grueling war effort. He never reached his half-century calling the shots in those Syrian bases, and Assad’s victorious successors refused to honor the sweeping concessions the deposed dictator had granted to his Russian patron.

In the end, Tartus and the new Hmeimim never realized the full strategic potential that Moscow had not long ago foreseen for them. And they never will.