Sudanese Foreign Minister Ali Yusuf Sharif told Russian media on Wednesday that an agreement first proposed in 2017 to give Russia a naval base on the Red Sea coast will finally proceed, giving Moscow an opportunity to replace the base it lost in Syria with the fall of dictator Bashar Assad.
Russia’s only refueling port on the Mediterranean Sea was its base in the Syrian city of Tartus, which the Russians built in 1977, abandoned after the fall of the Soviet Union, and reactivated in 2015 when they intervened to prop up the Assad regime.
The Tartus base became much more important to Russia after it invaded Ukraine in 2022 because the Russians wanted NATO to feel pressure along its southern flank and it had plenty of ships stuck in the Mediterranean Sea after Turkey refused to allow them to pass through its territory to reach the Black Sea and join the Ukraine campaign.
Assad was abruptly toppled by a whirlwind rebel offensive in early December. The new rulers of Syria, led by an al-Qaeda offshoot called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), seemed disinclined to let Assad’s patrons in Russia keep their Tartus naval facility. Although the insurgent government was fairly polite to the Russians at first, satellite photography showed Russian forces almost immediately began withdrawing from Tartus.
On Tuesday, the rebel-controlled Syrian Defense Ministry blocked a Russian military convoy from entering Tartus. Syrian forces kept the convoy of over 30 missile-laden vehicles bottled up at a checkpoint for eight hours, then ordered them to return to Khmeimim airbase, Russia’s only other operational facility in Syria.
Negotiations between Damascus and Moscow over the fate of Russia’s bases is supposedly ongoing, but Tuesday’s incident suggested they are not going terribly well. The Russians were probably trying to evacuate their missiles from Syria for redeployment to Ukraine, so blocking the port and leaving those weapons stranded in the middle of the country is a provocative move by the Syrian government.
“Russia almost certainly continues to actively engage HTS to develop ties and promote itself as a beneficial partner. However, Russia’s negotiating position is weaker due to various factors, including, probably, the Syrian leadership’s hostile attitude towards former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who is now being sheltered by Russia,” British Defense Intelligence assessed this week.
These developments undoubtedly made Russia more interested in concluding its long-moribund deal with Sudan for a base on the Red Sea coast.
The deal was proposed in 2017 during the reign of longtime Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir, negotiated in 2019, and signed in 2020 — by which time Bashir had been overthrown by a military junta.
The military government actually seemed willing to let Russia build its base, a modest facility that would host up to four Russian warships at a time under a 25-year lease, but implementation of the agreement was unaccountably delayed for three years – and then the junta went to war with itself.
The horrific civil war that erupted in 2023 between junta leaders Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed “Hemeti” Dagalo left much of Sudan in ruins and evidently put Russia’s naval base on the back burner. However, right around the time Assad tumbled in Syria, Russian officials began popping up in Port Sudan, which has been the wartime capital of Burhan’s government ever since Dagalo’s militia captured the national capital of Khartoum. The prospective site for Russia’s base is not far from Port Sudan.
Russia has worked to maintain ties with both sides of the Sudanese civil war, but a Sudanese general said last year that Russia would pay for its base by supplying Burhan’s forces with munitions, which might put a crimp in Russia’s relationship with Dagalo.
The Russians may have calculated that staying on Dagalo’s friends list is no longer worth the effort, as the tide of the civil war appears to be shifting in Burhan’s favor. The Sudanese Army claimed on Tuesday to have recaptured most of Khartoum from Dagalo’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), while RSF supplies and morale are running low.
The international community may also turn decisively against the RSF after it reportedly attacked a refugee camp Wednesday, sending in gunmen with their unit patches ripped off to set much of the facility ablaze.
Foreign Minister Sharif said during a visit to Moscow on Wednesday that officials from Burhan’s government have spoken with the Russians about concluding the port deal and the two sides “are in complete agreement.”
“There was a deal signed, and there is no disagreement,” he stressed, without providing any further details on when the Russian port might become operational. He hinted the Russian port might be considerably larger than the minimal facility envisioned by the original 2019 deal.
Royal United Services Institute associate fellow Samuel Ramani said another obstacle to building Russia’s port on the Red Sea was eliminated by the death of Russian mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin in August 2023. Moscow officially supported Burhan’s government, while Prigozhin’s Wagner Group mercenaries did business with the RSF.
“Russia courted both Burhan and Hemeti so it could get a basing agreement regardless of who prevailed in Sudan’s intra-military civil war. What moved the needle appears to be Russia’s hard pivot towards supporting Burhan,” Ramani told the Financial Times (FT) on Wednesday.
“A Russian Red Sea base in Sudan would ease logistical pressure on its forces in Africa, which now rely on Libya for logistics with the loss of bases in Syria,” Ramani noted.
Another possibility, suggested by European Council for Foreign Relations visiting fellow Jonas Horner, is that Sudan wants to use the specter of a Russian naval base to squeeze more support from the United States and Europe.
Syria could likewise be using Russia’s military bases as leverage to get Moscow to forgive some $8 billion in debt racked up by Bashar Assad. The HTS government has not been shy about demanding concessions from Russia and Assad’s other patron, Iran, to prove they care more about the Syrian people than their deposed dictator.
At a summit in Dubai on Wednesday, Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shibani said his government has seen some “positive” signs from Moscow and Tehran, but both need to do more.
“Syrian people have wounds and pain that they suffered at the hands of these two countries. In order to restore the relationship, the Syrian people must feel comfortable with this relationship,” Shibani said.
