The Russian naval base of Tartous and the air base of Hmeimim in Syria are key infrastructures for Russia to maintain its influence in the Middle East, in the Mediterranean basin and as far as Africa.
Russian troops, an Su-35 fighter and Mi-24 helicopters, during a parade at the Hmeimim base, in May 2021 (SANA / -)
Tartous
Created in 1971, the result of an agreement between President Hafez al-Assad and the USSR, the naval base in the port of Tartous is the only permanent Russian base in the Mediterranean.
This facility provides a critical refueling and repair site for Russian ships, which can remain in the Mediterranean Sea without having to pass through Turkish straits to reach Kremlin bases in the Black Sea.
With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, many Soviet military installations around the world closed. But Moscow maintained its foothold in Tartus, although much diminished.
Things changed in the 2010s, thanks to the increasingly ambitious policies of Vladimir Putin. Russia is spending to modernize its army, and is launching a project so that
Tartous can accommodate heavy ships and thus allow the Russian fleet to project itself into the region.
Things are accelerating in 2015, with Russia putting its army and its group of Wagner mercenaries at the service of the survival of Mr. Assad's power.
At the end of 2015, Russian media reported that 1,700 Russians were deployed there. But the information remained very fragmentary. Currently, the number of men there remains unknown and the Russian Defense Ministry does not provide any precise information on its numbers in Syria.
The warships are said to have left Tartus
As Islamist rebels carried out their lightning offensive that led to the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's regime, Moscow announced that naval exercises had taken place in the eastern Mediterranean between December 1 and 3.
According to the Russian army,
a thousand military personnel, 10 ships – including two frigates and a submarine – and support boats took part, as well as 24 planes.
According to satellite images provided to AFP by the company Planet,
none of the Russian warships based at Tartus were in port as of December 9.
The head of Russian diplomacy, Sergei Lavrov, denied on Saturday that the Kremlin fleet had fled the country.
Hmeimim
Since their intervention in 2015, the Russians have had the Hmeimim air base in Syria, which depends on deliveries of weapons and equipment arriving by sea in Tartous, around sixty kilometers further south.
The Hmeimim base is known to be very well protected,
with state-of-the-art air defense systems that cover a wide area in the region, including over Turkey,
and military police units.
Here too, the Russian army does not publish information on its numbers. But, according to many experts, they have been greatly reduced, whether men or aircraft, since 2022 to be redirected to the Ukrainian theater of operations.
According to Pierre Razoux, academic director of the Mediterranean Foundation for Strategic Studies (FMES),
At the end of July, the Russians had “22 combat planes, around fifteen attack helicopters and drones”.
It is from this base that the Russian air force has carried out devastating bombings against the Syrian rebellion and the country's cities since 2015, an intervention which then made it possible to save the power of Bashar al-Assad.
It is also a key crossing point for
mercenaries and military advisors on their way to Africa,
where Moscow seeks to strengthen its influence.
