Russia Is Giving Back the Civilian Half of Tartus and Hmeimim. Damascus Says It Has Three Months.

Syria and Russia have reached a memorandum of understanding on the future of the Hmeimim air base and the naval facility at Tartus, Syria's Foreign Ministry announced Sunday through the state news agency SANA, settling a question that has hung over Damascus and Moscow since the fall of Bashar al-Assad.

Under the terms described by the ministry, the civilian components of both installations pass to Syrian state management within three months. That includes the airport at Hmeimim, on the Mediterranean coast in Latakia province, and the commercial berth at Tartus port. The military portions are not being closed outright; they are to be converted into what the ministry called "joint training and capacity-building centres," an arrangement it said was designed around "preserving mutual interests." The transition is supposed to be complete inside the three-month window.

The agreement is the product of roughly 18 months of negotiation, conducted at intervals since Assad's government collapsed in December 2024 and Russian forces pulled back from inland positions to concentrate on the two coastal sites. Those two facilities are not incidental holdings. Tartus is Russia's only warm-water naval repair and resupply point on the Mediterranean, and Hmeimim has functioned as its logistics hub for operations across the Middle East and into Africa. They are the only official Russian military bases outside the territory of the former Soviet Union.

Russia had not publicly commented on the memorandum as of Sunday evening — a silence that leaves open how much of the reported framework Moscow has actually accepted and on what timetable. Syrian officials framed the deal as a matter of sovereignty rather than expulsion. "The central government in Damascus is in control of all assets that belong to Syria," Al Jazeera's correspondent reported from the capital, summarizing the government's position.

For President Ahmed al-Sharaa, whose forces led the offensive that ended 13 years of civil war and more than half a century of Assad family rule, the arrangement threads a needle. Russia spent that war as Assad's decisive foreign backer, and its air campaign is directly associated in Syrian public memory with the destruction of opposition-held cities. But Moscow retains a United Nations Security Council veto, wheat and fuel that Syria needs, and physical custody of Assad himself, who fled to Russia and whose extradition Damascus has demanded without success. Al-Sharaa has met Putin twice since taking power, most recently in January 2026.

What the memorandum does not resolve is the status of Russian personnel and equipment at the repurposed military sites, the duration of any joint arrangement, or whether Russian warships retain berthing rights at Tartus once the commercial berth reverts to Syrian control. Those questions matter well beyond Syria: Tartus is the anchor of Russia's ability to sustain a naval presence in the Mediterranean at all.