By Entorno and AFP | 2024-12-11

KYIV -- Many in the international community welcomed the ouster of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, linking the fall of the regime to its reliance on Moscow, whose military is mired in the Ukraine war.

Russia has strategically valuable army and naval bases in the country, where it launched a military intervention on the side of al-Assad in 2015.

Two years later, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that Moscow had accomplished its mission in Syria's civil war, and that Russia was there to stay.

"If the terrorists raise their heads again, we will deal unprecedented strikes unlike anything they have seen," he said December 11, 2017.

But as the rebels, dominated by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group, swept across Syria in recent weeks with the goal of toppling Russia's main ally in the Middle East, those "unprecedented" strikes failed to materialize.

The cost of war

Moscow's war effort in Ukraine has drained its ability to support Syria, analysts and Ukrainian officials said.

In February 2023, then-UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace estimated that "97% of the Russian army, the whole Russian army, is in Ukraine."

"If 97% of the Russian army is now committed to Ukraine, with an attrition rate very, very high, and potentially their combat effectiveness depleted by 40%, and nearly two thirds of their tanks destroyed or broken, that has a direct impact on the security of Europe," he said.

"Our involvement over there had a cost," Anton Mardasov, a Moscow-based analyst focusing on the Middle East, told The New York Times in a December 8 story, referring to Russia's war in Ukraine. "The cost was Syria."

Al-Assad's decades of rule turned "Syria into a pariah state that relied on protection and support of other dictatorships," Ukraine's Foreign Ministry said in a statement December 8.

His ouster "will also significantly weaken the expansionism of Russia, which for years has used the Syrian territory, its resources and people as a foothold to spread its destructive influence in the Middle East, to destabilize regional stability and security, and to create hotbeds of threat for Syria's neighboring states," it said.

"Assad has fallen," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said on X. "This is how it has always been and will always be for dictators who bet on Putin. He always betrays those who rely on him."

'Unreliable partners'

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said al-Assad's ouster showed that Russia and its allies can be defeated.

The European Union (EU) and NATO member serves as a crucial logistics hub for Western military aid to Kyiv.

"The events in Syria have made the world realise once again, or at least they should, that even the most cruel regime may fall and that Russia and its allies can be defeated," Tusk said on X.

"Russia and Iran were the main backers k the Assad regime, and they share the responsibility for the crimes committed against the Syrian people," said NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.

"They also proved to be unreliable partners, abandoning Assad when he ceased to be of use to them."

"The end of Assad's dictatorship is a positive and long-awaited development," the EU's top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said on X. "It also shows the weakness of Assad's backers, Russia and Iran."

'No time for Syria'

"What good is Russia as a partner if it cannot save its oldest client in the Middle East from a ragtag band of militias?" asked Eugene Rumer, the director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

"Besides the operational setback, it is also a diplomatic and reputational blow."

The rebel victory, he told The New York Times, has become "part of the price they are paying for the war in Ukraine."

"The priorities totally changed," said Russian journalist Denis Korotkov. "There was no time for Syria."

Vulnerable regimes in Latin America

The fall of al-Assad's regime underscores the fragility of authoritarian governments and signals potential ripple effects in Latin America, despite the backing of allies like Russia and Iran.

Both nations have seen their ability to support partners in the Middle East diminished, let alone in distant regions such as Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

Governments in Caracas, Managua, and Havana are closely observing Syria's collapse "with great apprehension," Geoff Ramsey, an analyst at the Atlantic Council, told Voice of America (VOA) in an article posted on December 10.

"This sends a signal of vulnerability to the Latin American allies of the Assad regime and could undermine the perception of Russia as a reliable guarantor of stability and political, military and economic support," Ramsey stated.

Elsa Cardozo, a professor and international relations expert, explained to VOA that neither Russia nor Iran is in a position to provide unwavering support to regimes ideologically aligned with them, such as Assad's.

She noted that the war in Ukraine has drained Moscow’s resources, while Tehran, preoccupied with escalating tensions with Israel, has been unable to extend significant assistance to Assad over the past year.

Cardozo added that the challenge of defending allies becomes even more pronounced when those allies are "thousands of kilometers away," such as in the Americas.