Putin refuses to take the fall of Assad regime as Russia's defeat in Syria

A terrorist enclave could have emerged in Syria if Russia had not intervened. Therefore, Russia has achieved its goals in Syria, President Vladimir Putin said during his Q&A conference in Moscow on December 19.

Photo: commons.wikimedia.org by Bernard Gagnon, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Damascus, Syria

The events that have happened in Syria recently do not indicate that Russia has suffered a defeat in this country, President Vladimir Putin said answering a question from an NBC journalist.

"You and those who pay [your] salaries want to present everything that is happening in Syria as some kind of failure, a defeat for Russia. I assure you that this is not the case. And I will tell you why. After all, we came to Syria ten years ago so that a terrorist enclave would not be created there, similar to what we can see in some other countries, for example, in Afghanistan. On the whole, we have achieved our goal," Putin said.

Even those armed groups that once fought with the government forces of Bashar al-Assad's regime have undergone certain changes.

"It is not for nothing that European countries and the United States want to establish relations with them today. If they are terrorist organizations, why are you getting involved? It means that they have changed. This means that to a certain extent the goal has been achieved," the Russian president said.

Russia did not have ground troops in Syria — there were only naval and air force bases in the republic, Putin said. The ground component consisted of the Syrian army and pro-Iranian units, he specified.

Russia expects Syria to live in peace. Moscow maintains relations with all the groups that control the situation in the republic, as well as with all the countries in the region, the president said. The overwhelming majority of them want Russia to keep its military bases in Syria, Putin said.

"Not sure yet, we have to think about it, because we have to decide for ourselves how our relations will develop with the political forces that now control and will control the situation in this country in the future,” Putin said. "If we stay there, we must do something in the interests of the country where we are staying,” the president concluded.

"When armed opposition groups approached Aleppo, there were about 30,000 people defending Aleppo. About 350 militants entered the city. Government troops and pro-Iranian groups retreated without a fight and blew up their positions. The same thing happened almost throughout the entire territory of Syria. <…> We took 4,000 Iranian fighters to Tehran. Some of the pro-Iranian fighters left without a fight for Lebanon, some for Iraq," Putin said speaking about the fighting in Syria.

Details

On 30 September 2015 Russia launched a military intervention in Syria after a request by the government of Bashar al-Assad for military support in its fight against the Syrian opposition and Islamic State (IS) in the Syrian civil war. The intervention was kick-started by extensive air strikes across Syria, focused on attacking opposition strongholds of the Free Syrian Army along with the rebel coalition of the Revolutionary Command Council and Sunni militant groups under the Army of Conquest coalition. In line with Syrian government propaganda which denounces all armed resistance to its rule as "terrorism"; Syrian military chief Ali Abdullah Ayoub depicted Russian airstrikes as facilitating their campaign against terrorism. Russian special operations forces, military advisors and private military contractors like the Wagner Group were also sent to Syria to support the Assad regime, which was on the verge of collapse. Prior to the intervention, Russian involvement had been heavily invested in providing Assad with diplomatic cover and propping up the Syrian Armed Forces with billions of dollars of arms and equipment. In December 2017, the Russian government announced that its troops would be deployed to Syria permanently.