EDWARD LUCAS: Putin’s imperial overstretch in Ukraine means he is now too weak to guard an important ally like Assad. But cornered, he might show extra harmful

Vladimir Putin will be tossing and turning in uneasy sleep in his luxury palace outside Moscow. How long will it be before a mob loots its glitzy halls, just as contemptuously as Syrians rampaged through Bashir al-Assad’s private quarters in Damascus?

The fall of the Assad regime is not just a defeat for the ruling clan in Syria, but for its backers. The shockwaves ripple all the way to Moscow and beyond.

For a start, Russia is now closing its prized naval base at Tartus on the Syrian coast. The warships are long gone, but vital infrastructure and secret technology must be destroyed or removed.

The nearby Russian Hmeimim airbase – repeatedly used in Assad’s brutal suppression of rebel forces in previous years – is being evacuated, too. Putin proudly announced in 2017 that the two bases were part of Russia’s ‘permanent’ military presence in the region.

They would also guarantee the Syrian ally’s survival against what seemed then to be defeated rebel forces. ‘If they raise their heads again, we will deal unprecedented strikes unlike anything they have seen,’ Putin avowed.

Fate dictated differently. Russia kept the brutal Assad clan in power in the face of a popular uprising in 2011, just as it is the Kremlin that has now saved the dictator’s skin by offering asylum.

His departure marks the death of Putin’s ambitions to be a power-broker in the Middle East. From January, US President-elect Donald Trump will hold the ring. Russia is – again – an irrelevance.

It sends a signal of weakness around the world. Russia was once strong enough to face down the West in a faraway desert land. Now it is too weak to protect its strategically vital protege.

Putin’s reckless war in Ukraine is the cause of his imperial overstretch. And it is in Ukraine that he may pay the most immediate price of his failure.

The implosion of the Assad regime will weaken Putin’s hand in any negotiations to end the war. His aim in the final days of Biden’s tenure was to gain an overwhelming military and diplomatic advantage. That would have allowed him to dictate terms to the beleaguered authorities in Kyiv.

Now he is on the back foot, while Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is basking in the spotlight following a successful meeting with French president Macron and Trump at the restored Notre Dame over the weekend.

Trump himself took to social media to underline that very point. ‘Russia, because they are so tied up in Ukraine, and with the loss there of over 600,000 soldiers, seems incapable of stopping this literal march through Syria, a country they have protected for years,’ he wrote.

‘Putin has thrown Assad under the bus to prolong his war in Ukraine,’ said the former Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba, more pithily. 

‘His resources are scarce, and he is not as strong as he pretends.’

This is no cause for comfort: a cornered Putin will bargain harder and act more desperately and dangerously. But the truth is that his ill-judged invasion stretched Russia’s military, as well as its economy, to breaking point. The Kremlin has no spare planes or troops for anything other than the relentless meat grinder war in Ukraine.

And with Iran in trouble, Russia will be ever more dependent on the cult-like rogue state of North Korea and its powerful but impatient allies in Beijing.These signs of weakness will not be lost on other Russian clients in Africa and Latin America.

Indeed, the Syrian collapse undermines one of Putin’s great achievements – recasting his country as a global superpower. Boosted by oil wealth, and fuelled by boundless cynicism, Russia offered strongmen in resource-rich countries ‘dictatorship in a box’.

It could provide mercenaries, weapons, expertise in election-rigging and an arsenal of dirty tricks to help them win power and keep it. In return, these countries – such as the Central African Republic – offered Kremlin cronies lucrative access to diamonds and scarce minerals.

The West, hamstrung by human-rights concerns and political timidity, struggled to compete. France was a big victim, chased out of its former colonial stamping ground of West Africa.

But who will take seriously Putin’s offer of help now? The loss of prestige abroad carries a heavy political price at home.

‘Minus one dictator and ally of Putin,’ wrote prominent Russian opposition activist Ilya Yashin on social media, with a picture of an Assad banner in flames.

‘Dictatorships appear stable. Until they don’t,’ wrote Jonatan Vseviov, one of Estonia’s most senior diplomats.

Putin’s strength rests on the perception of invincibility. Nobody stands up to him at home, just as nobody will resist him abroad. Watch Russian media and he is portrayed as a master strategist, outfoxing the West with his steely nerves and iron will.

Yet people power in Syria, just as in Ukraine and other former Soviet satrapies, shows just how vulnerable that can be.

One minute the presidential palace is protected by a fearsomely loyal bodyguard, the next minute the mob is roaming through its wrecked rooms, looting, taking selfies and jeering.

Even worse for Putin is the fate of dictators who are unable to flee the mob. He frets obsessively about the fate of the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, sodomised by bayonets in a ditch in the last moment of his life.

For that reason Putin takes his personal security with the greatest seriousness. Russians speculate that the figure seen at public events may be a body double, whose appearances shield the real leader from the risk of assassination. His iron grip and personal paranoia have long sought to stymie any rival.

Rumours abound about his mental and physical health. The Russian leader is dead, mad, comatose or enjoying near-immortality because of a strict diet featuring quails’ eggs, beetroot and horseradish. Take your pick.

As a lifelong Kremlin watcher, I hesitate to make predictions about Russian politics – likened by Winston Churchill to two dogs fighting under a carpet.

But one thing I will say with certainty: what seems impossible or even unlikely in Russia has a habit of happening. The bloodthirsty Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin was, to put it mildly, an outside candidate to be Russia’s leader.

For that matter, so was Putin. Living in Russia in 1999, I watched the previously unknown bureaucrat move from zero to hero in the space of a few months.

The safest prediction in a closed, highly stressed society like Russia is that tomorrow will be like today. But when change comes, it tends to be abrupt.

Only 18 months ago, a motley bunch of mutineers were marching on Moscow led by the foul-mouthed mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin.

The rebels were greeted by cheering crowds in provincial Russian cities. The military stayed on the sidelines. It seemed as if Putin’s two decades in power would end in ignominy.

The coup fell apart, and the confident predictions of his downfall ended as quickly as they had flourished.

As John Gerson, an eminent visiting professor at King’s College London, tells me, the edifice of Putin’s power may look as if it is cast from concrete. But in the dictator’s mind, he knows how quickly it can turn to meringue.

• Edward Lucas is author of The New Cold War: Putin’s Threat To Russia And The West