The base at Tartus is nice to have, sure, but it is a small one: Most of the time, one ship dedicated to repair and support idles there. The arms sales are nice, too, but they’re just a small fraction of total global Russian arms sales. “India buys orders of magnitude more weapons than Syria,” says Georgy Mirsky, a Russian Middle East expert. And if Russia loses Assad, he says, “Don’t worry, we’ll survive.”
More central to Vladimir Putin’s understanding of Syria is his conservatism.
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