Syria hopes for “strategic partnerships” with Ukraine, its new foreign minister has told his Ukrainian counterpart, as Kyiv moved to build ties with the new Islamist rulers in Damascus amid waning Russian influence.
Russia was a staunch ally of ousted Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and has given him political asylum. Moscow has said it is in contact with the new administration in Damascus, including regarding the fate of Russian military facilities in Syria.
“There will be strategic partnerships between us and Ukraine on the political, economic and social levels, and scientific partnerships,” Syria‘s newly appointed foreign minister, Asaad Hassan al-Shibani, told Ukraine‘s Andrii Sybiha on December 30.
“Certainly the Syrian people and the Ukrainian people have the same experience and the same suffering that we endured over 14 years,” he added, apparently drawing a parallel between Syria‘s brutal 2011-24 civil war and Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian territory culminating in its full-scale 2022 invasion.
Sybiha, who also met Syria‘s new de facto ruler Ahmed al-Sharaa in Damascus on December 30, said Ukraine would send more food aid shipments to Syria after the expected arrival of 20 shipments of flour the following day.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had announced on December 27 the dispatch of Ukraine‘s first batch of food aid to Syria comprising 500 metric tonnes of wheat flour as part of Kyiv‘s humanitarian “Grain from Ukraine” initiative in co-operation with the United Nations World Food Programme.
Ukraine, a global producer and exporter of grain and oilseeds, traditionally exported wheat and corn to countries in the Middle East but not to Syria, which in the Assad era imported food from Russia.
Russian wheat supplies to Syria have been suspended because of uncertainty about the new government in Damascus and payment delays, Russian and Syrian sources told Reuters in early December. Russia had supplied wheat to Syria using complex financial and logistical arrangements to circumvent Western sanctions imposed on both Moscow and Damascus.
The ousting of Assad by al-Sharaa’s Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, has thrown the future of Russia’s military bases in Syria – the Hmeimim airbase in Latakia and the Tartous naval facility – into question.
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has said the status of Russia’s military bases would be the subject of negotiations with the new leadership in Damascus.
Al-Sharaa said earlier in December that Syria‘s relations with Russia should serve common interests. In an interview published on December 29, he said Syria shared strategic interests with Russia, striking a conciliatory tone, although he did not elaborate.
