Russian intervention in the Syrian civil war

• 1. Introduction

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  Russian intervention in the Syrian civil war began in September 2015. At that point, Bashar al-Assad's Ba'athist government controlled just 26 percent of Syrian territory and appeared close to collapse. Assad had asked Moscow for support against the Syrian opposition and the Islamic State. Vladimir Putin answered by sending the Russian Armed Forces beyond the former Soviet Union for the first time since its dissolution. Analysts pointed to aims well beyond rescuing an ally. These included limiting United States influence in the Middle East and securing access to the Eastern Mediterranean. Russia also wanted military capacity for other theaters, including the Red Sea and Libya. Putin described his own goal as stabilising the legitimate power in Syria and creating the conditions for political compromise. Others speculated Russia wanted to seize territory from militias backed by the United States, the United Kingdom and Arab states.

  What followed was years of airstrikes, warships and private military contractors, ending only when Assad fled the country in December 2024. How did a campaign meant to rescue a crumbling government end with Russian troops evacuating their own bases? What did the intervention cost Syrian civilians, and why did Moscow's motives run deeper than the fight against the Islamic State?

• 2. Hidden Motives

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  General Leonid Ivashov said in an October 2016 interview that Russia's involvement in Syria let it block pipelines planned between the Middle East and Europe. Blocking those routes protected the dominance of the state gas company Gazprom, competing directly with any pipeline carrying Qatari gas through Turkey. Nearly a decade later, after Assad's fall in 2024, Russian journalist Irina Alksnis wrote for the outlet RIA about the same benefit. She described it as ruining Western plans of anti-Russian games in the energy sector.

  Putin's fear of a Russian uprising ran alongside the pipeline calculus. He had watched the pro-Russian Gaddafi regime fall during the 2011 Libyan Revolution, an outcome that unsettled him. The 2011-2013 Russian protests sharpened those fears further. In 2014 the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity ousted the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych. Putin responded by starting the Russo-Ukrainian War and annexing Crimea, moves that triggered sweeping international sanctions. He accused Western governments of engineering these color revolutions and worried a similar uprising could end his own rule. That same anxiety over losing control at home would soon push Putin toward a formal military buildup on Syria's coast.

• 3. Setting The Stage

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  Russian intelligence reports in 2015 estimated that Assad's forces effectively controlled a meagre ten percent of Syrian territory, a bleaker picture than public figures suggested. City after city was falling to rebel forces. The government had already lost the governorates of Idlib, Aleppo, Raqqa, Deir Az Zor, Al-Hasakah, Deraa and Quneitra. Opposition fighters had also pushed Assad's army out of the Hama, Damascus and Homs provinces. Acting on the advice of Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov and other military leaders, Putin chose full-scale intervention. The alternative was watching an ally collapse into the Western sphere of influence.

  Other objectives included showcasing Russian military prowess by guarding the naval port at Tartus and expanding influence across West Asia, North Africa and Europe.

  To avoid repeating the disastrous Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Russia adopted an irregular warfare strategy instead of a full ground occupation. Ground operations were subcontracted to the Syrian Armed Forces, allied foreign militias, and Russian private military companies such as Wagner. Russia itself retained control of the skies, running the air campaign directly rather than delegating it.

  In July 2015, according to Russian and Syrian officials, Assad made a formal request to Moscow for airstrikes against what he called international terrorism. He also laid out Syria's mounting military problems. Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran's Quds Force, reportedly visited Moscow that same month to work out details of a joint campaign. Russian officials denied the visit took place.

  By August 2015, Russia had begun sending Russian-operated warplanes, T-90 tanks, artillery and combat troops to an airbase near the port city of Latakia. On the 26th of August 2015, the two countries signed a treaty letting Russia use Syria's Hmeimim airport free of charge, indefinitely. Ratified by Russia's parliament in October 2016, the agreement also granted Russian personnel and their families jurisdictional immunity under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.

  Warships from Russia's Black Sea Fleet reached the eastern Mediterranean in September 2015. That same month, Iran, Iraq, Russia and Syria set up a joint information center in Baghdad to coordinate against Islamic State. Press reports nicknamed the body the 4 plus 1. Foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said in mid-October 2015 that Russia had invited the United States to join the center. He said Washington's response was, in his words, unconstructive. Russian ambassador Alexander Yakovenko said the United Kingdom gave a similar rebuttal. In late December, Turkish president Recep Erdogan said he had declined a similar offer from Putin. Erdogan said he could not sit alongside a president whose legitimacy is distrustful.

  On the 30th of September 2015, Russia's Federation Council unanimously granted Putin's request to deploy the air force in Syria. That same day, a Russian representative at the Baghdad center told American forces in the target area to leave immediately. An hour later, Russian aircraft launched their first airstrikes against opposition strongholds in Homs and Hama. The Russian Orthodox Church praised the decision as a holy war against terrorism. Those opening raids over Homs and Hama marked only the beginning of a much larger air campaign that would run for years.

• 4. The Air Campaign

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  Russia framed its campaign publicly as a war against terrorism, though rights groups later documented scorched earth methods used against civilian areas. The air campaign through 2018 operated across three distinct ranges of engagement. Long Range Aviation and the Black Sea Fleet fired Kh-101 and Kalibr missiles respectively at distant targets.

  Su-24 and Su-34 tactical bombers handled mid-range strikes throughout the campaign. Close air support came from Su-25 jets and Mil Mi-24 helicopters, flying low over contested front lines.

  In 2016, more than 80 percent of Russian strikes hit opposition militias that were themselves fighting Islamic State, not the group itself. By January 2017, the Russian Air Force was claimed to have flown 19,160 air combat missions and delivered 71,000 strikes since the campaign began.

  October 2015 marked Russia's first operational use of precision-guided munitions, a technology that had lagged behind other major powers' arsenals. Most Russian jets instead relied on the SVP-24 guidance system, which let them drop unguided bombs with near-precision accuracy at a fraction of the cost. Analysts estimated the campaign's early phase cost between $2.3 million and $4 million a day, with each 3M-14T cruise missile priced at roughly $1.2 million.

  By late August 2017, Russian aviation reported having flown 28,000 combat missions and carried out about 90,000 strikes since the intervention began. That kind of sustained bombing fed directly into ground offensives that put cities like Aleppo back under government control.

• 5. Turning The Tide

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  Despite Russian air power, Assad's government kept losing ground at first, with its territory falling to just 17 percent by 2017. The turn came through a string of concrete victories between late 2016 and 2020. Government forces recaptured Aleppo from the Army of Conquest, then took Palmyra and Deir ez-Zor back from Islamic State in 2017.

  A 2018 offensive in southern Syria delivered the government full control of Daraa and Quneitra provinces. A separate north-western offensive pushed rebel lines back further still. By September 2017, Russia's military claimed 85 percent of Syrian territory had been liberated from illegal armed formations, with the offensive still ongoing.

  In December 2017, Russia announced its troops would remain in Syria permanently rather than withdraw once the fighting eased. Diplomat Ranjit Gupta wrote in The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs that Russian reinforcement had been a godsend for Assad, boosting his army's sagging morale. Fawaz A. Gerges of the London School of Economics called the intervention a game-changer, saying it let Assad's forces shift from defense to offense. Vincent R. Stewart of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency said Russian reinforcement had changed the calculus completely. He added that Assad now held a far stronger negotiating position than six months earlier.

  By the time Russia withdrew most of its forces in mid-March 2016, it had flown over 9,000 sorties in five and a half months. That campaign helped Syrian troops capture 400 towns and 10,000 square kilometers of territory. Analysts compared Russian tactics in the offensive to those used against Chechen separatists in the Battle of Grozny, fought in 1999-2000. Those same offensives left a toll on the ground that human rights groups would spend years documenting.

• 6. The Human Cost

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  By April 2018, Russian airstrikes had reportedly killed more than 7,700 civilians, about a quarter of them children. Also killed were 4,749 opposition fighters and 4,893 Islamic State fighters. The Syrian Network for Human Rights and the Violations Documentation Centre studied the period from September 2015 to the end of February 2016. They found Russian strikes killed over 2,000 civilians in that window alone. That toll exceeded the combined deaths caused by Islamic State and Ba'athist Syrian forces over the same period.

  Between September 2015 and March 2019, Russia's aerial campaigns were estimated to have caused around 18,150 deaths. Roughly 8,000 of those killed were civilians, including many women and children. About 5,000 more were rebel fighters, and another 5,000 belonged to Islamic State.

  Russian and allied ground forces used what has been described as a starve-or-submit strategy, besieging rebel-held towns and cities until they capitulated. The weapons deployed included unguided bombs, cluster bombs, incendiaries similar to white phosphorus, and thermobaric munitions, according to documentation by international monitors.

  The 30th of September 2015 was the first day of Russian bombing. The Violations Documentation Centre recorded more than 43 civilians killed that day in the Homs region, including nine children and seven women. Two vacuum bombs were used against villages and a food distribution center. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry denounced the strikes on opposition areas before the UN Security Council. Defense Secretary Ash Carter called the attacks on opposition-held territory doomed to fail.

  Amnesty International said in 2016 that Russia was guilty of some of the most egregious war crimes it had seen in decades. The group documented attacks on schools, hospitals and homes. The organization's Tirana Hassan said Russian warplanes would loop around after an initial strike to hit the rescue workers who arrived to help the wounded. Human Rights Watch reported that same year that Russian and Syrian forces had used cluster munitions banned under a United Nations resolution. That resolution, passed on the 22nd of February 2014, prohibited such weapons in populated areas. Médecins Sans Frontières said Russian or Assad regime warplanes deliberately struck a hospital in Ma'arrat al-Nu'man. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also attributed that strike to Russia. These findings pushed the crisis onto the desks of foreign ministries far beyond Damascus and Moscow.

• 7. Divided Response

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  Israel, Jordan and Egypt, along with countries already aligned with Moscow, either backed the intervention or stayed neutral. The United States, the United Kingdom and France condemned it, as did Turkey and most Gulf states. They accused Russia of war crimes and of enabling similar crimes by Assad's government. Washington answered with economic sanctions against Russia.

  On the 24th of November 2015, a Turkish Air Force F-16 shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 strike aircraft. Syrian rebels shot and killed the pilot as he descended by parachute. Russian forces rescued the weapons systems officer, but a Russian marine who took part was injured and later died en route to a medical center. Turkey told the UN Security Council that the aircraft had violated its airspace near Yayladağı province for 17 seconds, after ignoring repeated warnings. Russia denied crossing into Turkish airspace and released maps showing a different flight path. In response, it deployed S-300 and S-400 air defense systems to Latakia and aboard the cruiser Moskva.

  A U.S. fighter jet downed a Syrian government Su-22 near Tabqa on the 18th of June 2017. Russia responded by announcing it would treat any coalition aircraft flying west of the Euphrates as a target. Russia's military also suspended its deconfliction hotline with American counterparts based at Al Udeid, prompting Australia to suspend its own flights over Syria. U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis sought to calm the situation days later. He described an active deconfliction line running from the Joint Chiefs of Staff down through battlefield commanders in Baghdad. That same balancing act between Moscow and Washington would matter far less once Russia's own war in Ukraine began pulling its forces out of Syria.

• 8. The Collapse

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  Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine began pulling troops out of Syria as early as May that year. The Moscow Times reported in September 2022 that Russia's last reserves in the country were being redeployed. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights counted at least 3,935 Russian airstrikes during 2022 alone, killing 159 Islamic State militants and injuring 255 more. By the summer of 2023, Russia still maintained 20 military bases and 85 additional military points across Syria. Most sat in Hama, Al-Hasakah, Latakia and Aleppo provinces.

  In March 2023, Assad told Russian media that Syria might need to host more Russian bases in the future. He said Russia's presence there was tied to the global balance of power. That balance broke in November 2024, when a Syrian opposition offensive prompted Russia to renew its airstrikes. Those strikes killed at least 50 people in urban neighborhoods and refugee camps across Idlib and Hama, including Morek, Khan Sheikhoun and Kanfranbel.

  Rebel forces entered Aleppo on the 29th of November 2024, then seized Hama and Homs the following day. On the 1st of December, a Russian airstrike on the University of Aleppo killed 12 people, including two journalists, and injured 23 others. By the 7th of December, opposition fighters had reached the outskirts of Damascus. Russia confirmed that Bashar al-Assad had left the country and stepped down.

  On the 6th of December, an airstrike had already failed to sever the Al-Rastan bridge linking Homs and Hama, only damaging it. Opposition forces then took Homs with little resistance. Russia evacuated its military fleet from bases in western Syria, locked down its embassy in Damascus, and ordered its citizens to leave the country. The airbase at Hmeimim and the naval facility at Tartus were left cut off in a tense standoff. Syria's new opposition leaders guaranteed the safety of both. On the 24th of January 2025, Syria terminated the agreement that had granted Russia a 49-year lease to operate the port at Tartus. That decision left Russia's remaining foothold on the Mediterranean without a legal basis to stand on.