The time had come to bend the knee — or at least bend to reality.
A delegation of Russian diplomats arrived last Tuesday in a caravan of white SUVs for a summit in Damascus and an unenviable assignment: lay the groundwork for Russia to keep its military bases in Syria, less than two months after rebels had toppled Moscow’s preferred strongman, Bashar al-Assad.
To do so, the delegation would need to win over a people the Russian military had bombed ruthlessly, helping Mr. al-Assad, for years.
Awaiting them was Ahmed al-Shara, who had survived a decade of Russian airstrikes to emerge as Syria’s new interim leader. He stood in the presidential palace and faced the Kremlin’s envoys for a long-awaited reckoning.
The talks that ensued, the first between Moscow and Damascus since the end of the nearly 14-year war, ended unresolved. But they marked the beginning of potentially drawn-out negotiations about what role, if any, Russia will play in postwar Syria, having lost its bid to keep Mr. al-Assad in power.
The meeting demonstrated the kind of geopolitical horse-trading that has begun in the aftermath of Syria’s civil war — with the potential to remake the Middle East. World powers are jockeying for influence, as Syria’s fledgling leadership tries to win legitimacy, security and aid through disciplined and stony-eyed realpolitik.
“I think the general air in Damascus is, ‘We Syrians don’t need a fight with anyone at this point, including our former enemies,’” said Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “So de-escalation and pragmatism are the names of the game.”
Still, it was the Russians who were asked to make concessions. Mr. al-Shara emphasized that any new relations with Moscow “must address past mistakes,” and requested compensation for the destruction Russia caused, his government said in a statement.
He also demanded that Moscow hand over Mr. al-Assad and his top associates to face justice, according to two officials in the caretaker government with knowledge of the meeting.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a former spy who prizes loyalty, almost certainly would not agree. Asked the day after the meeting whether Mr. al-Shara requested Mr. al-Assad’s extradition, Mr. Putin’s spokesman declined to comment.
Mr. al-Shara otherwise appeared surprisingly amenable to cooperating with Russia, as opposed to Iran, Mr. al-Assad’s other key ally, which the new authorities in Damascus have said is no longer welcome in Syria.
In an interview with the BBC in late December, Mr. al-Shara cited Syria’s “longstanding strategic relations” with Moscow and said he was “not in a hurry to get Russia out of Syria, as some people imagine.”
He noted, in a separate interview with Saudi state television, that Russia has supplied the Syrian military’s arms for decades and provides experts who run Syria’s power plants. The implication: Damascus may need Russia in the future.
“They are absolutely desperate for legitimacy and international support,” Mr. Lister said of Syria’s new leaders. “Causing any big international rupture would be the worst thing they could consider doing.”
Beyond possible deliveries of oil and grain from Russia, what Mr. al-Shara needs is for Moscow not to play spoiler in his effort to reconstruct Syria and build a government, said Hanna Notte, an analyst at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
“This is a country that is now, politically speaking, being built from the ashes,” she said. She pointed out that the Russians are permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and could impede Mr. al-Shara in many ways, should they decide not to be “politically benevolent.”
Mr. al-Shara himself has noted Russia is considered the world’s second-most powerful military, and said his newly formed government was not in a position to oppose major powers.
At the meeting, where Russia was represented by its top Middle East envoy, Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, neither side appeared to be in a rush to make any big decisions. What the rest of the world, and in particular the United States, European Union, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, demand from Syria’s new leaders could also influence Russia’s fate.
In recent weeks, a flurry of diplomats from those and other countries have arrived in Damascus to meet Mr. al-Shara.
Russia wants to keep its naval base on the Mediterranean at Tartus, which dates to the Soviet era. It also seeks to maintain the Hmeimim Air Base outside Latakia, which Moscow has used as a supply and stopover hub for expeditionary operations in Africa. So far, the new Syrian authorities have not said no, and Russia has stayed put, despite moving materiel off the bases.
Syria’s pragmatic rhetoric has been reciprocated in Moscow.
After years of defending the Assad regime on the battlefield and at the United Nations, Russian leaders have spun the loss of their longtime ally as a win and extended an olive branch to the new authorities, whom Moscow had long denounced as terrorists.
“I would call it improvised opportunism,” Ms. Notte said. “It is a pretty remarkable pivot.”
Mr. Putin, speaking in December at his annual news conference, said Russia had won, rather than lost, in Syria, because Moscow had prevented the country from becoming a terrorist enclave. He said he had yet to even see Mr. al-Assad, though he committed to meeting him at some point. It is unclear if they have met since.
The Russian leader offered the use of Russia’s bases to deliver humanitarian aid to the Syrian people, who only weeks before had been weathering Russian airstrikes.
He would keep Russia’s presence there, he said, only if Moscow’s interests coincided with those of the political forces that had taken control.
At the United Nations, the Russian ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, said in January that those forces were “behaving quite competently.” The friendship between Russia and Syria, he emphasized, is “not connected to any regime.”
The navy suit and tie Mr. al-Shara wore to the meeting with the Russian envoys belied his past as a Qaeda fighter turned Islamist rebel leader. So did his nonconfrontational rhetoric in the run-up to the talks, and his professed willingness to make nice with former foes, including the United States.
Mr. al-Shara welcomed a top State Department delegation in December, despite having once spent time in Iraq imprisoned by U.S. forces and having been designated a terrorist by the U.S. government with a $10 million bounty. (Washington withdrew the bounty after the talks.)
Mr. al-Shara needs sanctions relief from the United States, as well as Washington’s support on the Security Council, for Syria to begin an economic recovery and access international aid.
The United States also still has troops on the ground, backing Kurdish-led forces in northeast Syria that Mr. al-Shara doesn’t control. He has stated his desire to keep the country whole, which would include that territory, where Washington backed local forces to destroy the Islamic State.
European officials have visited Damascus and offered a path to sanctions relief, but have made clear that they would disapprove of the retention of a Russian military presence in the country.
How the Trump administration will approach the question is unclear. In December, as the Assad regime fell, Mr. Trump said on social media that the war in Syria was “not our fight” and that the United States should have nothing to do with it.
The question of Mr. al-Assad’s fate adds to the delicate nature of the negotiations between Moscow and Damascus.
Mr. al-Shara is still trying to establish legitimacy among the Syrian people and disparate Syrian groups, and striking a deal with Russia while it is harboring the strongman who killed so many Syrians could undercut his standing. That is one reason delaying any commitment to Moscow could make sense.
Mr. Lister described the request for Mr. al-Assad as a maximalist opening demand, characteristic of early-stage negotiations.
“It hits the mark in terms of laying down the principle: ‘We may be willing to be pragmatic today, but we have not forgotten history,’” Mr. Lister said. “Russia’s complicity in all manner of war crimes in Syria is not something Syrians will be forgetting anytime soon.”
Inside Syria, Mr. al-Shara is still pursuing remnants of the Assad regime’s force to consolidate control. Moscow could make that task more difficult.
Though the loss of the bases in Syria would dent Russia’s power in the region, Moscow potentially has other options. The Kremlin’s backing of the military ruler of eastern Libya could offer an alternative location for a Russian naval base on the Mediterranean. Already, Russia has been using Libyan air bases for flights.
The status of the Russian bases in Syria may not be resolved soon.
“I think that both sides benefit from delaying the negotiations on the fate of the bases,” said Anton Mardasov, a Russian military affairs expert focusing on Syria. “Moscow can thus preserve its image, since it has already managed to hold out as long as possible and not leave immediately after the fall of the Assad regime, and Damascus can for now negotiate the lifting of sanctions.”