A Russian ship is pictured at the Russian naval base in the Syrian Mediterranean port of Tartus on September 26, 2019. (Photo by MAXIME POPOV/AFP via Getty Images)
AFP via Getty Images
Syria and Russia reached a memorandum of understanding in early August on the future of Russia’s access to the strategic coastal Tartus naval and Hmeimim air bases. While Russia will still retain conditional access going forward, the days of it 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 about 18 months of negotiations led by the Foreign Ministry.
“The memorandum provides for state management of civilian facilities, including Hmeimim Airport and the fourth commercial quay at Tartus Port, bringing them gradually under civilian administration,” Syria’s state-run Syrian Arab News Agency reported on August 10. The takeover of Tartus, the SANA report outlined, “is set to boost the port’s operational capacity, speed up cargo handling and ease pressure on other berths.”
Additionally, military facilities at the site will become training centers after a three-month transitional process. So, while Russian troops can stay, they will stay 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. Long gone are the days when Russian President Vladimir Putin could summon his Syrian counterpart from the presidential palace in Damascus to Hmeimim to meet him. In one such surprise visit in December 2017, Assad was physically blocked by a Russian soldier from following the Russian leader in a degrading reminder of who was boss in that relationship. Today, it’s the remaining Russian soldiers in Syria who follow the rules of their hosts.
“The agreement does not mean a complete Russian withdrawal from Syria,” noted Ibrahim Hamidi, editor-in-chief of the Saudi-owned Al Majalla. “But according to what has been announced, it does mark the end of the ‘Russian bases’ model established under the Assad regime and a transition toward a new Russian presence regulated in agreement with Syria’s new government.”
India’s The Sunday Guardian was much more scathing. “Strip away the diplomatic language, and the meaning is clear enough: Russia no longer runs its own military bases in Syria,” wrote John Dobson. “It will retain a presence in some repurposed and jointly managed form, but the era of Moscow operating Tartus and Hmeimim as autonomous Russian military outposts is over.”
Russia previously enjoyed unrestricted access to these strategic bases when Assad ruled over the country. The Syrian dictator gave Moscow unprecedented concessions 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 directly intervened 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 Syria’s infrastructure, including hospitals and medical facilities, in the process. Tartus served as a logistical hub for Russian warships operating in the Mediterranean Sea. Beyond giving Russia a foothold and a warm-water port, these bases were also vital for sustaining and resupplying its military and paramilitary operations in Africa.
That privileged position looked in jeopardy as Assad’s enemy, Ahmed al-Sharaa, spearheaded a lightning offensive in late November 2024, culminating in the capture of Damascus by December 8. Assad fled to his new life in ignominious exile in Moscow, evacuated via plane from Hmeimim. Russia quickly went from bombing Sharaa’s forces when he led the armed Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to embracing him as Assad’s successor. It withdrew most of its strategic weapons, including its long-range S-400 missile systems, from the bases shortly thereafter but pursued negotiations with Sharaa’s new government over their future status, hoping to preserve some foothold. By early 2025, Hmeimim and Tartus were a shadow of their former selves. Russia’s remaining troops in Syria found themselves at the whim of the new government in Damascus for access and even security given the precarious and “basically defenseless” position they now found themselves in the new post-Assad Syria. Still, they retained them, even during the sectarian violence that terrorized the coastal region around them that March, leaving thousands of Alawites dead in its wake.
Moscow and Damascus spent months negotiating the future status of Hmeimim and Tartus. In October 2025, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested that they could serve as “humanitarian hubs for sending humanitarian cargoes” to Africa, where Russia still has strategic interests. The following June, Russia revealed it was in talks over a “possible reformatting” of the bases. That came shortly after Moscow made its first resupply run via ship to Tartus since Assad’s departure. Then on August 9, the memorandum of understanding finally determined their post-Assad fate. It arguably could have been worse, with Syria’s new rulers deciding to expel the Russians altogether in revenge for all of their comrades and civilians Russian warplanes killed over those nine years from September 2015 until December 2024. In the end, they chose a more pragmatic solution, cognizant that cooperating with Russia has benefits and that the post-Assad period and Moscow’s weakened position since invading Ukraine presented the opportunity for a more equal, 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 to 1971, when Moscow established a naval support facility there through the 1971 Soviet-Syrian lease agreement. Moscow lost access to Egypt’s Alexandria, Mersa Matruh, and Port Said during that decade, making Tartus essential for sustaining and supporting Soviet naval operations in the Mediterranean. It moved its fleet repair and support equipment from Alexandria to Tartus. As early as 1976, the CIA observed issues 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 provided generously in return for access to Tartus.
In 1988, Reagan administration officials claimed that the Soviet Union was expanding Tartus as a hub to maintain its Mediterranean fleet. In a report to Congress, then director of the National Security Agency, Rear Admiral William Studeman, noted that reliable access to Tartus would “obviate the necessity of frequent naval transit to home ports in the Black Sea” for Moscow. “It would permit longer deployments and an overall increased Soviet presence in an area of considerable political-military volatility,” he said. Interestingly, he also noted “speculation that the Soviet-Syrian agreement will provide for Soviet sovereignty over the facility,” and assessed that “it is highly unlikely that Syria would or could make such concessions to any foreign power.”
A peculiar incident in April 1989 saw two Syrian helicopters firing at Soviet vessels 35 miles off Tartus, killing and injuring a small number of their crew. 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, there was a reported flurry of Soviet naval activity in Tartus. It reportedly coincided with a secret agreement with Damascus to turn part of Tartus into a Soviet naval base “off limits to Syrians.” However, Tartus was not about to become a main hub for an expanded Soviet naval presence in the Mediterranean. The Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, and its successor, the Russian Federation, didn’t 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 sought to reestablish a permanent naval presence in the Mediterranean, raising eyebrows in the U.S. and Israel. “By raising Syria’s stock in the region, analysts say such a move could further complicate western attempts to achieve settlements in Lebanon and Palestine,” noted a 2007 analysis in The Guardian. “Defensive missile and surveillance systems around any Russian installations might also shift the military balance to Israel’s disadvantage.”
By 2010, Russia had just two bases abroad: one in Ukraine’s Sevastopol 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 aimed to modernize Tartus facilities by 2011. The Arab Spring of that year reached Syria, and Bashar al-Assad cracked down violently on peaceful demonstrators. Syria descended into a violent civil war by 2012. That same year, Russia dispatched two amphibious assault ships to Tartus in a move interpreted by analysts at the time as a “display of power.” While Russia wouldn’t militarily intervene in the civil war for another three years, it nevertheless wanted to avoid the embarrassment of the facility being overrun by the anti-Assad opposition.
After it did intervene in 2015, deploying advanced fighter jets and S-400 air defenses, an embattled Bashar al-Assad found his regime much more beholden and dependent on Moscow than it ever was under his father Hafez al-Assad. He gave many more concessions over 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 permitted Russia to dredge Tartus and install floating berths to support larger warships, including nuclear-powered ones. These upgrades could one day allow the port to host up to 11 Russian naval vessels. Russian military analyst Igor Korotchenko outlined the strategic potential of an expanded base there. “If our new combat surface ships and submarines outfitted with Kalibr cruise missiles are based in Tartus, this will allow Moscow to keep the situation in the Middle East and Mediterranean under control,” he told Russia’s state-run Sputnik News.
Russia also wanted to separate the Hmeimim airbase from the adjacent civilian Bassel Al-Assad International Airport since it planned to stay for years to come. Furthermore, in 2020, Putin signed a directive for “negotiations with Syria on transferring more real estate and water territory to the Russian military’s possession.”
In the end, these grand plans amounted to little. Russia’s fateful 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine saw it draw down military resources, including from Syria, for that depleting war effort. It never got its half-century calling the shots in those Syrian bases, with Assad’s victorious successors refusing to abide by the extensive concessions the deposed dictator had granted his Russian patron.
Tartus and the newer Hmeimim ultimately never realized the full strategic potential Moscow not long ago envisaged for them. And they never will.