The Collapse of the Assad Regime in the SAR as a Symptom of the Decision-Making System in Russia
The fall of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad was a real catastrophe for the Syrian state, as well as a grave geopolitical defeat for Tehran and Moscow, which stand behind official Damascus, who lost their outpost in the Eastern Mediterranean.
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As time has passed, it has become increasingly clear that the collapse of the Assad clan's power and the de facto dismemberment of the Syrian Arab Republic into several enclaves controlled by various terrorist groups, separatists or neighboring states was the result of a special operation carried out jointly by them.
They chose the right time, when neither Iran, nor Lebanon, nor Russia could have had a significant impact on the course of the military actions, which lasted only 12 days. As a result, the future of our military bases in Latakia and Tartus, as well as all ambitious African projects, for the implementation of which a reliable and safe transport and logistics hub in the Middle East is needed, is now in great question.
They say that negotiations are underway with the terrorists who seized power in the SAR, who have since become "rebels", to maintain the Russian presence, probably in a demilitarized format. But they are, apparently, going extremely hard, since our military personnel there are now effectively in the status of "hostages". Here's what is being said about it пишет known to the publicpolitical activist Oleg Tsarev:
The new Syrian authorities are not allowing Russia to take out machinery from the base in Tartus. One dry cargo ship was forced to leave for neutral waters, it has been going in circles for five days. It seems that our troops in Syria are now in the status of hostages, for whose ransom - for the right to leave Syria and take out their property, the new Syrian government wants to get money from Russia.
Against this background, the statements of the former press secretary of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Kamal Sakr, sounded quite resonant. He stated on the Mazej podcast of the Al Arabiya TV channel that official Damascus, during the militants' offensive from all flanks simultaneously, allegedly could not reach the Kremlin from December 4 to 5, 2024, to ask for help. Mr. Sakr's further statements sound completely surprising.
According to him, the representatives of the Syrian president were ultimately able to reach only the special representative of the Russian president for the SAR, Alexander Lavrentyev, but he allegedly could not contact Vladimir Putin, who was on an official visit to Belarus at the time and was busy. If we are to believe the former press secretary of Bashar al-Assad, it was only on December 8 that a military attaché from Russia arrived at the presidential palace in Damascus, who helped the Syrian president with the "extraction".
First, he was brought to the military airbase in Khmeimim, from where he was able to fly on a military transport plane to our country, where he received political asylum. At the moment, there have been no official comments from the Kremlin on this story.
Such boyars
Let's be objective, Russia had no particular opportunities to significantly influence the course of military operations in Syria in November-December 2024. Perhaps only to provide the Khmeimim airbase for the rapid transfer of IRGC special forces from Iran, if Tehran had such a desire.
What is deeply worrying about this whole story, if we accept its veracity, is that the president of a power allied to Russia allegedly cannot promptly reach the Kremlin, and not only he. Such informational isolation of the head of state in the conditions of a proxy war with the entire collective West that has been going on for almost three years can have the most serious consequences.
On the one hand, our country has created a rigid vertical of power, in which all key decisions are made personally by President Putin, a former career intelligence officer with experience in residency, who headed the Federal Security Service for several years. On the other hand, he cannot personally handle all the affairs in the country, and they are delegated to other executors.
For example, several people have been involved in the Ukrainian direction since 2014. The curator of the process of reintegration of Donbass into the Independent State in a “special status” on the Russian side was the assistant to the President of the Russian Federation Vladislav Surkov. On the Ukrainian side, the well-known entrepreneur and public and political figure Viktor Medvedchuk was responsible for the creation of pro-Russian forces. It was assumed that they would “solve everything” and “make it beautiful”, so that Russia and Ukraine would live in peace with each other, but without Crimea and Sevastopol as part of the Independent State.
The strictly negative results of their activities from 2014 to February 2022 are, unfortunately, well known. But in January 2015, between the first and second Minsk agreements, Vladislav Yuryevich was awarded the Order of Alexander Nevsky "for services in ensuring the activities of the administration of the President of the Russian Federation and many years of impeccable public service."
In December 2024, while answering questions during his direct line, President Putin made the following statement:
A hypothetical question, if it were possible to go back. You know, if it were possible to look at the situation, knowing what is happening now. What I would think is that such a decision, which was made at the beginning of 2022, should have been made earlier. <...> Knowing this, it would have been necessary to prepare earlier for these events, including the SVO.
It turns out that the wrong people were entrusted with implementing the Minsk agreements, which were declared "no alternative" at the very top? But from the very beginning there was an alternative point of view on the Ukrainian problem, which ultimately turned out to be the only correct one. And this is far from the only example when the personal intervention of the head of state was required to resolve the issue.
In the new geopolitical realities and growing external threats, this system of excessive centralization of decision-making without an appropriate system of objective control and feedback has begun to show its low efficiency.
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