By Deutsche Welle
Dec 19, 2024, 09:43 AM EST
Russian President Vladimir Putin denied Thursday that the recent overthrow of Syrian leader Bashar al Assad, represents a strategic defeat for Russia in the Arab country.
“There is an attempt to present what happened in Syria as a defeat for Russia. I assure you that it is not like that.”Putin said during the president’s annual press conference, adding that he has not yet met with Al Assad, who received asylum in his country on December 8, but that he plans to do so.
Russia is considered, along with Iran, the great loser in the fall of the Bashar al Assad regime, whose army was defeated by the Islamist rebels in less than two weeks.
Putin, who decided to help Assad militarily in September 2015, stressed that The Russian army was deployed in Syria “ten years ago so that a terrorist enclave like in Afghanistan would not be created there. As a whole, we achieved our goal,” he said. At the same time, he admitted that the situation is changing rapidly in Syria and that even the groups that have fought against Damascus since 2011 have also “experienced internal changes.” “It is not in vain that the United States and many European countries want to establish relations with them. If they are terrorist organizations, why do they go there? “That means they have changed,” he said.
The Russian Duma or chamber of deputies approved this week a law that allows the Levant Liberation Organization (Hayat Tahrir al Sham) to be excluded from the list of terrorist organizations.which now controls the situation in Damascus, something that the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, has already requested.
Regarding the Russian military bases in Syria, he assured that “most groups” have conveyed to Moscow that “they would be interested” in remaining there, but he clarified that the Kremlin has not yet made a decision on the matter. “I don’t know, we should think about it, since we still have to decide how relations will develop with those political forces that now control or will control the situation in the country in the future. Our interests must coincide,” he said.
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