Khmeimim Air Base

Russia built Khmeimim in 2015, days into its military intervention on behalf of Bashar al-Assad, under a treaty signed with Damascus that August. From here, Russian jets flew missions over Aleppo, Idlib, and the approaches to Damascus, and by late 2017 Moscow had decided to make the arrangement permanent — folding Khmeimim into its standing overseas contingent alongside the Tartus naval basedown the coast, Russia's only warm-water port outside the former Soviet Union.

Then Assad fell. He fled the country in December 2024, and the ground under Russia's Syrian footprint shifted almost overnight. Russian forces pulled out a large share of their heavier hardware from Khmeimim and Tartus in the weeks that followed, including the S-400 air-defense batteries that had covered the entire Syrian coast. Even so, a EUAA country report found Russia still holding a presence at Khmeimim, Tartus, and a smaller post at Qamishli as of mid-2025 — even as Syria's new transitional government cancelled Moscow's contract to manage Tartus port outright. Open-source trackers described both bases as "fairly active" through this period. Changed hands, in other words, but not shut down.

That ambiguity narrowed sharply on August 9, 2026. Syria's Foreign Ministry announced a memorandum of understanding, the product of 18 months of negotiation: Khmeimim and Tartus would lose their status as Russian military bases entirely, converted instead into "joint training and qualification centres." Syria takes direct control of the civilian side — Khmeimim's airport, Tartus's fourth commercial pier — folding both into normal state administration within three months. The scale of the reversal is worth sitting with. In 2017, Russia and Syria signed a deal handing over Khmeimim and Tartus for forty-nine years. Nine years later, Damascus gave Moscow three months to reformat them. Neither government has said how many troops, what equipment, or what access rights will actually survive the transition — and Russia, notably, had not issued any public response to the memorandum by the time it was announced. Some outlets are already describing this as Russia losing its last military outposts in Syria outright. Others call it a rebrand that keeps Moscow a foothold, just under a different name. Which reading holds up won't be clear until the three-month window closes, sometime around early November 2026.