Russian strongman Vladimir Putin welcomed longtime Syrian dictator Bashar Assad to Syria on Wednesday evening, holding talks he claimed covered “the entire range of our relations” but focused specifically on the current situation in the Middle East.
Both the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency ( SANA) and the official Kremlin readout of the meeting offered little detail on what Putin and Assad discussed. The Kremlin published a readout of the two dictators’ public statements before their private conversation, which focused on trade and the greater situation in the Middle East.
“We have an opportunity to discuss the entire range of our relations,” Putin reportedly said. “It has been a long time since we last met. Of course, I would also like to hear your opinion on the situation in the region as a whole. Regrettably, we see that it tends to deteriorate. This directly concerns Syria.”
Assad offered only that he observed “complex transformation processes” in Russia and Syria and applauded the “maturity” of the relationship between Moscow and Damascus.
“Considering the current developments in the world, and in particular in the Eurasian region, our meeting today is extremely important for discussing the details of all these developments, as well as potential outlooks and scenarios,” Assad said.
SANA reported that Putin also highlighted “promising opportunities for economic and trade relations” between their two countries and specified that the “situation in the region” Putin referred to was the ongoing war in the Middle East.
Assad’s visit was the first to the country since October 7, when jihadist terrorists affiliated with the Iran-backed Hamas organization invaded Israel and killed an estimated 1,200 people in a siege featuring mass abductions, gang rape, infanticide, and other atrocities. The Hamas attack prompted much of the Muslim world to respond in support of genocidal terrorism, immediately condemning Israel for moving forward with self-defense operations to prevent Hamas from striking again rather than condemning Hamas for massacring civilians.
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The attack occurred after years of uncomfortable ties between Assad and his neighbors – including Hamas, which the Syrian regime once funded. Syria has been in a technical state of civil war for more than a decade, after a variety of rebel groups organized protests against the prolonged stay of Assad in power that Assad responded to with disproportionate repression. Much of the resistance movement against Assad was made up of Sunni Muslims – Assad himself is a Shiite Alawite Muslim – and ultimately attracted terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and Hamas.
The chaos of the civil war allowed for the rise of another Sunni terrorist group, the Islamic State (ISIS), and resulted in Syria fracturing into rebel-controlled areas, the ISIS “caliphate,” and separatist Kurdish areas in addition to the territory controlled by Assad. At the height of the war, at least ten major factions were fighting in the Syrian Civil War, not all directly participating in the struggle between Assad and the Syrian opposition.
Assad has been somewhat of an outlier among leaders of Muslim Mideast states in the post-October 7 landscape in part as a result of the fallout of the Syrian Civil War. While a close ally of Iran, one of Hamas’s top financiers, and an enemy of Israel’s he has not vocally supported the October 7 massacres. As recently as August 2023, Assad openly condemned Hamas for siding with the Syrian opposition in the civil war, accusing them of “treachery and hypocrisy” for not supporting a financial backer.
“Hamas claimed to stand with the same resistance that bore the flag of the French occupation of Syria,” he told Sky News at the time, referring to the opposition.
Assad last met with Putin in March 2023 during a similar visit to Moscow. Both the situation in Syria and the greater Middle East has changed significantly since then. As of 2024, the “caliphate” has long fallen and Assad controls most of Syria. While the war never technically ended, the Syrian “resistance” does not functionally pose a threat to the regime, which held on, thanks to help from Russia and Iran. The Syrian Kurds maintain a tense detente with Damascus, which opposes the Turkish occupation of some traditionally Kurdish parts of northern Syria. Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan regularly bombs parts of Syria, claiming it necessary to deter Kurdish separatism at home.
Erdogan once denied that subduing Kurdish separatism was the goal of Turkish military operations in Syria.
“Why did we enter? We do not have an eye on Syrian soil. … We entered there to end the rule of the tyrant al-Assad who terrorizes with state terror,” Erdogan said in November 2016.
More recently, in the August 2023 Sky News interview, Assad rejected the idea of attempting to reconcile with Erdogan on the grounds that the Turkish leader had shown no inclination towards ending Turkey’s military presence in Syria.
“Why would Erdogan and I meet? To have soft drinks together?” he joked. “We want to reach a clear goal. Our goal is to bring about their withdrawal from Syrian territory, whereas Erdogan’s goal is to legalize the Turkish occupation in Syria. This is why we cannot meet under Erdogan’s terms.”
In December, Qatari outlet al-Jazeera reported that Iran and the Hezbollah Lebanese terrorist organization had attempted to facilitate a “reconciliation” between Assad and Hamas and had been moderately successful prior to October 7. Assad popped up at an Arab League Council meeting in May focused on opposing Israel’s self-defense operations against Hamas, attending as a guest but not taking an active role.
Erdogan, one of the world’s most vocal supporters of Hamas, publicly offered talks to Assad in remarks in July.
“We will extend our invitation to Assad,” he said in an interview. “We have now arrived at a point where if Bashar Assad takes a step towards improving relations with Turkey, we will also show that approach towards him.”
Rumors suggested that Putin may be aiding in talks to make such a meeting happen, and rumors surfaced suggesting Erdogan would join Assad this week in Moscow, but that has not occurred.
