In the past year and a half, Russia has intervened militarily in two countries, Ukraine and Syria, where revolution and extreme political polarization threatened the governments of pro-Russian leaders. And that’s pretty much where the similarities between the campaigns end, except for one other commonality: Both Syria and Ukraine are home to Russian naval bases—in Tartus and Sevastopol, respectively.
Ports, and especially warm-water ports, have long played an important role in Russian foreign policy. Russia isn’t landlocked, of course, but Europe-facing ports such as Arkhangelsk and St. Petersburg were historically ice-locked for part of the year before the advent of the icebreaker in the 20th century (Russia’s port at Murmansk is ice-free, but it was built in 1915, and the Russian port at Vladivostok is on the Pacific). Moreover, none of these ports, even when open for business, allow for easy access to the bustling Mediterranean Sea. This has left Russia with an economic and military incentive to expand toward warmer waters. Beginning just before the reign of Peter the Great in the late 17th century, Russia fought a series of wars with the Ottoman Empire in a quest to establish a warm-water port off the Black Sea. By 1812, Russia had managed to secure control of the entire northern coast of the Black Sea.
Even with year-round ports on the Black Sea, access to the Mediterranean was still governed by the whims of whoever controlled the Dardanelles and Bosporus straits. During World War I, Russia made a never-consummated secret agreement with Britain and France that would have granted it control of Constantinople and the Turkish straits if the Allies proved victorious. Although Russia enjoyed access to naval bases throughout the Mediterranean during the Soviet era, the collapse of the U.S.S.R. brought an end to that access, with the exception of Russia’s base in Tartus, Syria.
Tartus lies on Syria’s western coast and has had a Russian naval presence since 1971. At the time, the Soviet Union was Syria’s primary arms supplier and used the deep-water port as a destination for shipments of Soviet weapons. Russia managed to maintain access to Tartus after the fall of the U.S.S.R. due in part to a deal that wrote off Syrian debts to the Soviet Union. The Russian naval base itself is reportedly less than impressive—it lacks large-scale repair facilities and a command-and-control capability, which would allow Russia to oversee operations from Tartus—but it is able to accommodate all Russian naval vessels except for the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier, and offers a means of offloading arms and personnel.
The city and naval base of Sevastopol, on the Crimean peninsula, were founded in 1783 by the Russian Empire, and the city remained part of Russia until its transfer to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1978. Six years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia renounced territorial claims to the city in exchange for a 20-year lease of the warm-water naval base. It’s a military asset with substantial strategic and symbolic value. The base houses Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and Mediterranean Task Force, the latter of which was only reestablished in 2013, and helps Russia project power in the Black Sea region and into the Mediterranean. The port was also the site of two major wartime sieges. As of last year, 15,000 Russian naval personnel were stationed at the base; in 2008, it served as a staging ground for blockades and amphibious landings during Russia’s war with Georgia.
