Key takeaways:

• The sudden success of the Syrian opposition took the Russian media by surprise, just like everybody else.
• Despite waging war against the opposition for a decade, the Russian government appears ready to negotiate with Syria’s new rulers, reflecting the Kremlin’s need to focus on more immediate military objectives in Ukraine. 
• On social media, Russian military bloggers and other commentators are less willing to turn the page. Many are livid. Russian treasure, materiel, and lives appear to have been lost for nothing.

Vladimir Putin’s global ambitions suffered a significant setback on Sunday when rebel forces chased Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, a close Putin ally, out of the country.

When the news broke, FilterLabs immediately started to follow narratives emerging on Russian mainstream and social media. The Kremlin and Russian armed forces had been propping up Assad for years. With Russian military bases in the country, Syria was Putin’s strongest foothold in the region. How would the Russian mainstream media try to spin this obvious catastrophe? And would anybody buy it?

The fallout in mainstream news

Using Talisman, our data platform, we took a look at sentiment around Syria in Russian mainstream media:

Sentiment around Syria had been rising in early December, as the Russian media assured everyone that things were under control. A typical headline: Russian Armed Forces Helped Syrian Troops Break Through Encirclement Near Aleppo. 

But then, a change. On Sunday, December 8, 2024, as the rebels rolled into Damascus and Assad fled the country, sentiment around Syria fell sharply. 

We also picked up a distinct and telling change in terminology. As late as the afternoon of Saturday the 7th, Russian officials and state-aligned media outlets were referring to the Syrian resistance as “terrorists.” In the early hours of the next morning, though, a Foreign Ministry statement used the term “Syrian opposition” instead. It was soon clear that this had become the approved term. On the 9th, state news agency TASS not only shifted their usage for new content, but even updated previous coverage to read “the opposition” or “the armed opposition.”

The conciliatory tone was a preview of things to come. In mainstream sources, Kremlin sources expressed a wish to cooperate with Syria’s new rulers. "Russian officials are in contact with representatives of the armed Syrian opposition, whose leaders have guaranteed the security of Russian military bases and diplomatic institutions on the territory of Syria, one TASS article read. “We hope,” another quoted Kremlin official stated, “to continue political dialogue for the sake of the interests of the Syrian people and the development of bilateral relations between Russia and Syria.”

This is an extraordinary about-face—or a “change of boots in a jump,” to use a Russian idiom—from a government that has been waging a brutal war against “the armed opposition” for a decade. 

To be sure, some news coverage quoted hardline hawks who called it a geopolitical disaster, lamenting wasted years of Russian military efforts and predicting chaos spilling into Central Asia and Russia. Others blamed Assad, painting him and his government as ineffective and corrupt.

But the overall message from the Kremlin, and the Kremlin-friendly press, was that now was the time to be pragmatic and move on. Russia must not lose focus on its real strategic focus. “Russia cannot afford its ‘favorite national sport’ of wringing hands and sprinkling ashes on the head,” wrote one news commentator. Painful as readers might find the loss of Syria, “Let me remind you that now a crisis is entering a decisive phase, which is incomparably more important for our country than the situation in the Middle East—the conflict in Ukraine.” Another Russian columnist wrote, “The main thing to understand is that the page of Russian foreign policy when decisions were made on the basis of ideological or sentimental considerations has been turned forever. Russia is acting in an exclusively pragmatic manner, focusing only on its own priorities.” 

The fallout on social media 

On social media, however, many Russians were unwilling to get on board with the Kremlin’s new program. In contrast to sentiment in mainstream sources, sentiment around Syria in our Russian social feed—sources such as social media platforms, online forums, and messaging apps—had remained more moderate as the rebels advanced. And like news sentiment, it dropped sharply when Assad fell:

As the sudden downturn suggests, many Russian social media users could recognize a defeat when they saw one. A number of them were livid. “Ten years of our presence,” fumed one Telegram user, “dead Russian soldiers, billions of spent rubles and thousands of tons of ammunition, they must be compensated somehow.” 

FilterLabs found that while many Russian military bloggers blamed Assad’s government (in line with Russian mainstream media), they reserved some blame for Putin, too: “The nine-year Russian adventure in Syria, initiated by Putin personally, seems to be coming to an end. And it ends ignominiously, like all other ‘geopolitical’ endeavors of the Kremlin strategist.”

A Telegram account associated with the old Wagner military group was even more caustic. “Pypa [a derisive name for Putin] is fighting ridiculously in Aleppo,” he declared. When the rebels “were defeated at the cost of Russian blood, money and Russian weapons withdrawn from the zone of the Defense Ministry, it was Pypa who was the triumphant, and when everything collapsed in just a matter of hours, Pypa had nothing to do with it. And why am I not surprised?”

Through Talisman, FilterLabs found a tremendous amount of anger among military, nationalist, and Z-movement bloggers. Here is a smattering of their comments:

• The thunder is unbelievable. … Assad is to blame himself, Iran is defeated, and we are nothing.

• Nine years of Moscow's military support for official Damascus have gone, pardon me, down the drain. It is a separate conversation about what it cost our country.

• Russian troops … will have to fight in Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan. A wave of jihadists will overflow the Russian border, and the Caucasus will go up in smoke again, terrorist explosions will erupt in Russian cities.

• Syria is another Middle Eastern country to be turned into a bloody ham by civil war.

Nationalistic and pro-war bloggers and social media commentators alike recognized the fall of Assad for what it is for Russia: a major strategic defeat. 

Conclusion

What can we learn from the whole affair? Russian media outlets are split between those seeing a catastrophic defeat and those reframing events as Assad’s failure, with Russia able to distance itself and in possession of strategic options.

The Kremlin obviously realizes that the war in Syria is lost. The pragmatism of the Russian government’s response is perhaps surprising, but we don’t have to look far for a reason. The Kremlin’s chief priority is Ukraine. 

But although the Kremlin may be ready to turn the page, many Russians are not. Military and ultra-nationalistic social media users saw the fall of Assad as a major strategic defeat for the Russian military and the nation’s larger ambitions, as well as a squandering of the resources and troops Russia had invested. If the Kremlin takes a breezy attitude toward the loss in Syria, it risks stoking discontent within the military and hard-line factions. 

The outcome in Syria could potentially hold a lesson for Ukraine as well. As a retired Russian colonel wrote in an op-ed on Sunday, “in today's world, victory is only possible in a quick and fleeting war. If you effectively win in a matter of days and weeks, but cannot quickly consolidate your success in military and political terms, you will eventually lose no matter what you do.”

Explore the Data in Talisman

Check out the live data on our data analysis platform, Talisman! You can explore the charts in the interactive dashboard for this newsletter, and subscribers with full platform access can even investigate the individual artifacts underlying the data. This is an ongoing story, so we'll be updating the dashboard with new data as the situation unfolds.

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More Syria analysis coming soon

The FilterLabs team is closely monitoring reactions to the fall of the Assad regime in different countries and will be sharing highlights from our findings. Up next: Iran.