News analysis Russia, bogged down in Ukraine, pays a price in Syria

Lines of Russian troops in desert khaki greeted President Vladimir Putin in Syria in 2017. Declaring that Moscow had accomplished its mission in Syria's civil war, Mr Putin pledged that Russia was there to stay.

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BERLIN - "If the terrorists raise their heads again," he said on the tarmac of a Russian airbase, "we will deal unprecedented strikes unlike anything they have seen".

But over the past two weeks, as rebels whom Russia called terrorists swept across Syria aiming to topple one of Moscow's closest allies, President Bashar al-Assad, those "unprecedented" strikes were nowhere to be seen.

Instead, with Mr Assad's ouster on Dec 8, Mr Putin has suffered one of the biggest geopolitical setbacks of his quarter-century in power.

He took that blow, analysts said, in large part because his military is bogged down in Ukraine.

By Dec 8, Russia had been reduced from kingmaker to bystander.

The extent of the fallout for Russia of Mr Assad's removal is still to be determined.

The key question, analysts said, is whether Russia manages to strike an agreement with Syria's new government to hold on to its Tartus naval base and its Hmeimim airbase, where Mr Putin delivered that victory speech in 2017.