The Russians are starting to leave Syria. They are not yet quitting in droves - there are estimated to be still around 30,000 in the country - but nevertheless they are beginning to go. Two planes have been sent by the Emergency Situations ministry in Moscow to Beirut, to pick up at least 100 Russian citizens who have decided to return home. They leave behind them a Syrian capital slipping ever further into the hands of units of the Free Syria Army, who are inching toward the old city. Damascus airport, 29 kilometers from the city center, remains in the regime's hands but the road out to it has several times been cut by rebels. Central Damascus suffered its first power cut last week and residents are beginning to suffer food shortages. It looks as if people are starting to panic buy, stocking up on nonperishable foodstuffs and water before stores run out of provisions. Damascus is thus showing all the signs of a regime capital tottering toward its inevitable end. Even those who did well under the dictatorship will either be wishing that the fighting would soon be finished or themselves making plans to quit. As with the American evacuation of Saigon, Vietnam in 1975, so the Russians will provide the weather vane that will predict the imminent demise of the Assad regime. It is inconceivable that there are not already plans in place to get the 30,000 Russian citizens out of the country. Marshaling points will have been designated and some form of transport earmarked for moving people away from their locations around the country. For the most important Russians in Damascus, the military echelons and intelligence cadres that have been advising Assad and his generals and the diplomatic staff, there will very probably be helicopter lifts, since the road to the airport, if not the airport itself, will have fallen into the hands of the Free Syrian Army. The destination for most Russian evacuees will almost certainly be their country's naval facility at Tartus, recently refurbished as the Kremlin's only warm-water seaport. Among the fleeing throng are likely to be senior regime members. Because they carried out such terrible crimes against their own people, they will be fully aware of the dubious fate that awaits them if they are captured by the rebels. It may even be that despite any heroic talk of never abandoning “his Syria”, Bashar Assad will himself fly to Tartus, thereafter to sail away into exile which will be small punishment for the depravities that he has visited upon the Syrian population. His close family will probably have already gone before him, hoping desperately that the wealth that they have squirreled away abroad will not be traced and frozen by a disgusted international community. In the end, there will be nothing left of Assad and his creatures and nothing left of the Russians, save the pummeled ashes of confidential documents, the empty, perhaps smoldering store rooms of the Tartus naval base with its motionless cranes and deserted wharves. Yet the Kremlin must even now be afraid that large numbers of its citizens may not be able to make their escape and will fall humiliatingly into rebel hands. With no Arab state willing to intercede for these people, they face a dangerous future in which they may be made to pay for the obdurate and purblind policy of President Vladimir Putin and his government. Therefore many may choose to leave sooner rather than later, signaling the final days of the dictatorship they came to prop up.
