Zelenskyy visits Damascus for security cooperation talks

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made an unannounced trip to Damascus on Sunday, meeting Syria’s interim president Ahmad al‑Sharaa and announcing a new security cooperation track between Kyiv and post‑Assad Syria. According to Euronews, it was Zelenskyy’s first official visit since Bashar al‑Assad was ousted in 2024, and it came after a Turkey stop and a Gulf tour focused on trading Ukrainian drone expertise for air-defence systems.

The immediate value of the Damascus visit is not Syria’s hardware. Euronews notes that Syria is not known to possess modern anti-ballistic air-defence systems, and it is not positioned to help Ukraine against Iranian drones and missiles. What Syria does have, unusually, is geography: two active Russian military facilities on its Mediterranean coast that Moscow has kept even after Assad’s fall—Khmeimim airbase and the naval facility at Tartus.

That makes the meeting less about a bilateral partnership than about access, leverage and information. Tartus, established in the Soviet era and expanded by Russia in the 2010s, has served as a staging point for Russian naval presence in the Mediterranean, including what Moscow calls its “permanent task force”, Euronews reports. When Turkey closed the Bosphorus to foreign warships in March 2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the base’s role grew because it allowed Russia to sustain operations without routine transit through the straits.

Khmeimim, meanwhile, is not a symbolic flagpole. Since 2015 it has been used for air operations inside Syria and, more recently, as a logistics hub for Russia’s activity in Africa, with aircraft using it to refuel on southbound routes, according to Euronews. For Kyiv, any relationship with Damascus that increases visibility into those supply chains—or creates political friction over them—offers a way to raise the cost of Russia’s wider war posture beyond Ukraine’s borders.

Syria’s incentives point in the opposite direction: extracting diplomatic and economic value while avoiding a direct break with Moscow. Euronews says al‑Sharaa has so far avoided demanding a Russian withdrawal and even met Vladimir Putin in January. Last year, al‑Sharaa reportedly sought Assad’s extradition from Russia in exchange for maintaining the Russian presence; Moscow refused. In that context, a public embrace of Ukraine can function as a bargaining chip: a signal to the Kremlin that basing rights have a price, and to Western capitals that Damascus can trade access and alignment for reconstruction support.

Zelenskyy framed the visit in terms of “stability and development” and said the sides discussed the consequences of war and the negotiation process over Russia’s invasion, Euronews reports. Al‑Sharaa described talks on economic cooperation and exchanging expertise. The concrete test will be whether this produces anything measurable: intelligence sharing, port access, inspections, or constraints on Russian movements.

For now, the most tangible fact is that Russia still operates Khmeimim and Tartus, and Ukraine’s president chose Damascus as a place to talk about the war with Russia.