By Arkady Dubrov
The flight of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to Moscow was hardly a long-planned event. Russian officials appeared as surprised by the rapid developments in Syria as most other observers. Perhaps President Vladimir Putin had some inkling when he hosted Assad in Moscow a week earlier. No joint photographs were released after the meeting. It is said that Assad’s family and entourage remained in the Russian capital.
It is no coincidence that the Assads found refuge in Russia. Only with the support of the Russians and Iranians had the regime managed to stay in power for so long. While Iran has been a diplomatic semi-pariah for decades, Russia, despite the Ukraine war and Western attempts to isolate it, has maintained its status as a major power. Until 2022, Moscow also remained closely integrated with the rest of the world as an economic and financial hub—something Tehran’s mullah regime could never offer. For the Assad clan, this provided an opportunity to benefit from the “big wide world” while circumventing the sanctions imposed against them.
As early as 2019, it became known that Assad’s maternal relatives had acquired around 20 apartments in and around Moscow City, the financial district west of the city center, through convoluted ownership structures, with an estimated value of $40 million at the time. The brothers Hafez and Rami Makhlouf, Assad’s cousins, were part of the regime’s inner circle before falling out of favor: Hafez as head of the notorious security police, Rami as the most influential businessman. Companies attributed to them, as well as Rami’s wife, her sister, and Hafez himself, purchased 19 apartments over the last decade. These are primarily located in the Gorod Stolits complex, consisting of two 73-story glass skyscrapers made of stacked cubes along the Moskva River.
The purchases, first reported by the Financial Times five years ago, occurred during a time when Assad’s rule was teetering—shortly before Russia entered the Syrian civil war in 2015. As Syria sank into anarchy, corruption, and poverty, the family secured its assets in Moscow.
To what extent these properties are available to Bashar al-Assad himself, despite family divisions, and whether some were acquired on his behalf, remains speculative. Likewise, the current whereabouts of the ousted dictator are unknown. For someone with many enemies, the bustling financial district would be an unusual place to reside. A villa behind high walls in one of the suburban compounds reserved for the Russian elite seems a more plausible fate for Assad.
It is also unclear under what legal conditions the fallen despot resides in Russia. If it is political asylum, he would be only the third person to receive such status since 1992, following Azerbaijani President Ayaz Mutalibov in 1992 and a North Korean defector. In all other cases where Russia provided refuge to prominent figures, it was “temporary asylum,” which must be renewed annually.
This status was granted to former presidents Askar Akayev of Kyrgyzstan and Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine, as well as American intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. Yanukovych and Snowden are now Russian citizens. Yanukovych’s exact whereabouts remain unclear. Initially, he settled in Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia after fleeing in 2014. Later, the now-deceased singer Iosif Kobzon reported that Yanukovych was his neighbor in a residential area on the outskirts of Moscow.
The “Moscow connection” of the Assads goes back more than half a century. The Soviet Union already had close ties with Syria. Beginning in the 1950s, Moscow saw the strategically located desert state as a counterbalance to Turkey, Iraq, Israel, and the West. Under Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, Syria became a key pillar of Soviet Middle East policy. It was a recipient of Soviet military and economic aid, with Moscow arming the country for the Six-Day and Yom Kippur wars against Israel. The relationship remained close even after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Now, there is a visible attempt to pivot opportunistically and swiftly to the new Syrian rulers. Whether it is helpful to host the ousted butcher in this context remains questionable.
