In 2015, Putin's Russia intervened directly in the Syrian civil war, supporting Assad. The following year, Damascus granted the Russians free use of the port of Tartus, along Syria's southern coast, for 49 years.
Tartus is Syria's second port after Latakia, and having a naval base there meant for Moscow a fundamental step towards its future. brosok na Jug (race south), that is, reaching the "warm seas", which has always been the unattainable strategic goal of Tsarist Russia.
At the beginning of the offensive launched by the jihadists of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which led to the fall of the Assad regime in recent days, the Russians had anchored two A-class frigates in Tartus. Gorshkov, a class frigate Grigorovich, two support vessels and a class submarine Improved Kilo. Those ships set sail from Tartus, probably to avoid becoming a target of rebel forces. At the moment, the Russian ships are anchored 13 kilometers from the Syrian coast and their passage through the Dardanelles, closed by Turkey to the transit of military ships by virtue of the Montreux Convention since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, and their crossing of the Strait of Gibraltar to reach the Baltic Sea, also in consideration of the enormous logistical difficulties involved, are to be excluded.
The naval presence in Syria responded to Moscow's strategic Mediterranean needs, which also became central due to the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. As he written General Caruso, Russia "paralyzed by its commitment in Ukraine and unable to militarily support Assad, is now trying to safeguard its strategic interests in the region, especially its crucial naval bases in the Mediterranean", relying on its maneuver possibilities derived from the ceasefire agreement in Syria negotiated together with Turkey and Iran. The "Astana format" remains Moscow's preferred route to protect its naval presence in Tartus.
However, the scenario in Syria remains particularly fluid and one of the options on the table is also that the new Syrian authorities, who will emerge from the agreement between the militias of the anti-Assad revolution, want to cut ties with the past regime and tear up the agreement for the use of the Tartus base with Russia. It is a possibility that the Russians are evaluating but, as already written, this does not necessarily imply that the Muscovite naval units will abandon the Mediterranean due to the logistical difficulties that navigation far from their bases entails. As Aurelio Giansiracusa wrote, there is a remote possibility, but that for Italy it would represent the worst case scenario, of the transfer of the Russian Mediterranean naval air device from Syria to Cyrenaica.
In particular, the city of Tobruk would be of interest to the Russians, since it has some characteristics that would make it suitable to host a naval base of similar size to that of Tartus, as already aired last June, when the cruiser Varyag (photo) and the destroyer Marshal Shaposhnikov They visited there, welcomed with great pomp by officers of the Cyrenaican navy.
It is a deep-water port, protected naturally by the bay of Marsa al-Agiusa and militarily by the nearby Russian-Libyan air base of al-Qardabiyah, along the Syrian coast.
Not to mention the hyperactivity that has been characterizing these days, increased at the beginning of the HTS offensive in Syria, to improve landing strips, strengthen perimeter defenses and build new logistics and equipment storage facilities in the three military bases of Brak al-Shatti in central Libya, Al-Jufra, also in central Libya, and in the aforementioned al-Qardabiyah.
For Russia, moving its naval presence to Cyrenaica would mean strengthening its already strong presence in eastern Libya, also as a function of its African policy, which is an integral part of Moscow's strategy of "encircling" Europe.
Photo: Минобороны России
