Vladimir
Putin orders Russian forces to begin withdrawal from Syria
Russian
president says soldiers should begin pulling out of country as
military intervention has largely achieved its aims
Patrick
Wintour in Geneva and Shaun Walker in Moscow
Tuesday
15 March 2016 07.11 GMT
The Russian
president, Vladimir Putin, has abruptly declared that he is
withdrawing the majority of Russian troops from Syria, saying the
six-month military intervention had largely achieved its objective.
The news on Monday,
relayed personally to the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, in a
telephone call from Putin, followed a meeting in the Kremlin with the
Russian defence and foreign ministers. He said the pullout, scaling
back an intervention that began at the end of September, is due to
start on Tuesday.
His move was clearly
designed to coincide with the start of Syrian peace talks in Geneva
and will be seen as a sign that Russia believes it has done enough to
protect Assad’s regime from collapse.
Putin said he had
ordered his diplomatic staff to step up their efforts to achieve a
settlement to end the civil war which has cost at least 250,000 lives
and is due to enter its sixth year on Tuesday.
Western diplomatic
sources were both sceptical and startled by Putin’s unexpected and
mercurial move. “We will have to wait and see what this represents.
It is Putin. He has announced similar concessions in the past and
nothing materialised,” a diplomat at the talks in Geneva told the
Guardian.
Putin and US
President Barack Obama spoke on the phone on Monday, with the Kremlin
saying the two leaders “called for an intensification of the
process for a political settlement” to the conflict. The White
House said Obama welcomed the reduction in violence since the
beginning of the cessation of hostilities but “underscored that a
political transition is required to end the violence in Syria.”
Syrian activists and
rights groups have accused the Russian campaign of indiscriminate
attacks and causing enormous civilian casualties, something Russian
officials have repeatedly denied. Moscow has also come under fire for
targeting moderate opposition groups, while claiming to be fighting
Islamic State.
The Syrian
opposition delegation had been given no notice of Putin’s
announcement but said it hoped it was a potential signal that the
Russian president was demonstrating that he, and not Assad, would
decide any endgame in Syria.
“If there is
seriousness in implementing the withdrawal, it will give the talks a
positive push,” said Salim al-Muslat, spokesman for the rebel high
negotiations committee. “If this is a serious step, it will form a
major element of pressure on the regime, because the Russian support
prolonged the regime. Matters will change significantly as a result
of that.”
The talks are likely
to be deadlocked on the extent to which Assad will be allowed to
remain in power during any political transition and after any fresh
UN-supervised presidential elections due in 18 months.
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In a statement
announcing the withdrawal, the Kremlin said Putin and Assad agreed
that the actions of Russia’s air force in Syria had allowed them to
“profoundly reverse the situation” in connection to fighting
terrorists in the region, having “disorganised militants’
infrastructure and inflicted fundamental damage upon them”.
“The effective
work of our military created the conditions for the start of the
peace process,” Putin added. “I believe that the task put before
the defence ministry and Russian armed forces has, on the whole, been
fulfilled. With the participation of the Russian military … the
Syrian armed forces and patriotic Syrian forces have been able to
achieve a fundamental turnaround in the fight against international
terrorism and have taken the initiative in almost all respects.”
Moscow will,
however, maintain a military presence in Syria, and a deadline for
complete withdrawal has not yet been announced. Putin said that the
existing Russian airbase in Hemeimeem in Syria’s coastal province
of Latakia and a naval facility in the Syrian port of Tartous would
continue to operate. The Russian air force has been capable of
running 100 sorties a day from the base and would be able quickly to
re-equip it if it felt the military balance required it to do so.
The Russian defence
minister, Sergei Shoigu, said on Monday the intervention had led to
the death of 2,000 rebels fighting against the Syrian government and
the killing of 17 field commanders. He added that more than 200 oil
installations had been attacked, 400 settlements taken and the chief
route to supply rebel fighters from Turkey had been cut off.
Russian airstrikes
killed 4,408 people including 1,733 civilians between September 2015
and early March 2016, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory
for Human Rights.
Given that
Russia-backed separatists launched one of their biggest offensives in
Ukraine in February 2015, just as Putin joined other world leaders in
negotiating a ceasefire, there will undoubtedly be scepticism over
whether the announcement of the end of the Syrian mission can be
taken at face value. However, Russia’s overarching goal of securing
a lead seat at the table over the fate of Syria has clearly been
achieved. A withdrawal will prevent the inevitable “mission creep”
that appeared to be on the cards.
“Essentially,
they’ve achieved their goals,” said Mark Galeotti, professor of
global affairs at New York University and currently based in Moscow.
“They’ve stabilised the regime, turned momentum round on the
battlefield so the regime has the upper hand, and now we’ve got a
ceasefire and political talks.”
As the talks opened
in Geneva, Staffan de Mistura, the UN special envoy for Syria,
reminded negotiators that a whole generation of Syrian children –
more than 3.5 million under the age of five – had never experienced
anything but war. De Mistura will brief the UN security council
meeting in New York in a closed session from Geneva and his aides
were making no initial response to the Russian move.
Western governments,
along with Turkey and Saudi Arabia, have repeatedly accused Putin of
deploying his air force not to bomb Isis targets but rebel forces
including the moderate Free Syrian army, often hitting schools and
hospitals. Earlier this month, Nato’s military commander in Europe,
General Philip Breedlove, accused Putin of “deliberately
weaponising” the refugee crisis from Syria in an attempt to
overwhelm Europe.
Muslat, meanwhile,
has denied the Russian intervention has seriously weakened the
opposition’s negotiating hand. Speaking to the Guardian, he said:
“We are closer to a solution now more than ever. We have been
patient and we hope to see something in the coming few days, at least
some light at the end of the tunnel that says at this, or that, time
there will be something for the Syrians.
“Before, we saw
all doors closed; now we see some doors open. We want to see an end
to the nightmare. We want to see it today and before tomorrow. The
future of Syria should be decided here and decided very soon.”
He claimed the shaky
two-week ceasefire and the start of humanitarian convoys was changing
the atmosphere inside Syria. But in a sign of how perilous the talks
are likely to become, the Syrian foreign minister, Walid Muallem, set
out the government’s determination to keep Assad’s future out of
the talks. “We will not talk with anyone who wants to discuss the
presidency ... Bashar al-Assad is a red line.”
Muslat countered:
“The political transition process has to be without Assad. You do
not want to keep a murderer who has killed half a million people and
destroyed a country. There is no place for Assad in Syria. He is not
acceptable to the Syrian people.”
Significantly, he
added that it might be possible for Assad to remain for a period if
there was a clear guarantee that he would stand down. “At the
least, we have to see something that Assad will go and we do not want
to hear from Russia that nobody should discuss the future of Assad.”
He stressed Assad
“could not be a member of any transitional governing body”.
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