On Sunday, December 8, the flag symbolizing Bashar al-Assad's regime was removed from the Syrian embassy building in Moscow, Russia. A few hours later, Russian news agencies confirmed what had been rumored since his fall from power on Saturday night. The Syrian leader and his family are in Moscow and have been granted political asylum by the Russian authorities.
So the Kremlin had to face the facts: with the sudden fall of its long-standing ally, it was faced with a fait accompli. True to its principle of not abandoning its own, it has offered refuge to the deposed dictator. "Assad and his family have arrived in Moscow. Russia granted them asylum on humanitarian grounds," said a Kremlin source quoted by the Tass and Ria Novosti agencies.
Assad, who had already been to Moscow at the time of the capture of Aleppo on November 30, did not appear in public, however. Meanwhile, President Vladimir Putin himself didn't comment on the situation. Both the Kremlin and Russian diplomacy have been offering minimal information. Assad "decided to resign from the presidency and left the country," Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Sunday. No further details were given. She only specified that the decision to leave had been taken "as a result of negotiations between Assad and a number of participants in the armed conflict on the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic." Implicit translation: it was a decision taken with, or even by Moscow.
Russia's deputy representative to the United Nations (UN), Dmitry Polyansky, announced on Sunday that Moscow was calling for an emergency closed-door meeting of the Security Council on the situation in Syria on Monday afternoon. He warned that "the depth and consequences for this country and the whole of the region have not yet been measured." Russian diplomacy, accustomed to defending its ally at all costs, is struggling to conceal the scale of this setback.
Just the day before, on the sidelines of a meeting in Doha with his counterparts from Turkey and Iran, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov deemed it "inadmissible to allow a terrorist group to take control of territory in violation of agreements," starting with UN Security Council Resolution 2254, which "strongly reiterated sovereignty, territorial integrity and unity of the Syrian Arab Republic." He referenced a resolution adopted by the UN in 2015 for a political settlement in Syria. That same year, it was the crucial military support of the Russian army that, in the face of Islamist forces, had enabled Damascus to gradually regain control of a large part of the country.
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