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Russians Fleeing Syria Cross Into Lebanon Russians Fleeing Syria Cross Into Lebanon
(about 9 hours later)
MOSCOW — Buses carrying several dozen Russian citizens crossed the Syrian border into Lebanon on Tuesday, news reports said, in preparation for flights to Moscow as the Russian government activates long-standing contingency plans to remove its citizens from the Syrian conflict zone. MOSCOW — About 80 Russian citizens crossed the Syrian border into Lebanon, boarded government-chartered planes and flew to Moscow on Tuesday, a small-scale evacuation that may signal the dwindling Russian hopes that President Bashar al-Assad will regain control of the country. The move came as a United Nations’ humanitarian official emerged after a rare mission through the conflict zone to express shock at the scale of devastation.
The number of departures was tiny considering that more than 30,000 Russian citizens are believed to live in Syria, including government and military personnel, private contractors and thousands of women married to Syrian men. Officials said there is no discussion of a mandatory or large-scale evacuation. Russia took pains to issue assurances that the departures of its citizens was not a large-scale evacuation, seeking to avoid sending a dire message to Mr. Assad and his circle. One top Foreign Ministry official said that the two Emergency Services planes had been sent to Beirut to deliver humanitarian aid and had simply offered a free trip to Russia for those “wishing to go.”
A Russian diplomat in Damascus told the Interfax news service that around 100 Russians were leaving, mostly people “whose houses are destroyed, who come from various ‘hot spots.’ ” The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that no diplomats would be on the flights.   The number of people who left was small, considering that more than 30,000 Russians are believed to live in Syria. Still, the flights had symbolic weight.
“This is not in any way an evacuation; what’s going on is that they are sending everyone who wants to go on these two airplanes,” the diplomat was quoted as saying. The emergency flights are free, he said, and may be necessary for families “whose homes have been destroyed, and who are left without food and shelter.” “Now we have reached this stage when everything gradually falls apart, and this is one of the manifestations,” said Aleksandr Shumilin, a Middle East analyst at the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute for Canada and the United States. “It is an important moment and important signal and an important fact. But it is formulated like a small, private incident.”
He added that it was not yet clear whether further flights would be necessary. Briefing reporters in Beirut, Lebanon, the United Nations humanitarian official, John Ging, said conditions inside Syria were “appalling” and that he was “shocked on so many levels” by the scarcity of food, medication, clean water and sanitation. The United Nations mission, which was given access by both pro-government and rebel forces, found that after 22 months of conflict, Syria’s grain production had been cut in half, with many farmers unable to harvest because they could safely reach their land.
Yelena Suponina, a Moscow political analyst specializing in the Middle East, said the flights do represent the beginning of an evacuation, but it remains unclear how many Russians will want to leave. Most of those who left on Tuesday, she said, were women, with some children, and very few adult men. “Every mother we met was appealing for us to understand the effects of this conflict on their children,” Mr. Ging said.
She said the contingency plans are being implemented because of increasing demands from Russians asking Moscow for passage out, and lawmakers beginning to complain about Russians who may feel trapped in Syria, amplifying a message that Russia has been sending for weeks — that its experts do not expect President Bashar al-Assad to regain control of the country. He said Syrians’ primary concern was to find a way to end the conflict. “We appeal to those who do have the political power to end this,” he said.
“I would say it is a symbolic moment, but not necessarily a turning point,” Ms. Suponina said. She said the turning point occurred last summer, when Russian officials “started to understand that the situation around civil war in Syria would continue and the Syrian authorities would not find it easy to return stability. This understanding did not arrive now, it arrived some time ago.” But a negotiated solution appears no closer. Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations’ secretary general, told a news conference at his New York headquarters that after discussions with Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations and Arab League envoy seeking to negotiate a political transition, that he was not optimistic.
A spokesman at the Russian Embassy in Damascus declined to comment on the Interfax report. “The situation is very dire, very difficult,” Mr. Ban said of the bitter fighting, in which roughly 60,000 people have died. “We don’t see much prospect of a resolution at this time.”
The Associated Press said four buses carrying 80 people, mostly women and children and some men, crossed into Lebanon. The United Nations is helping organize a donor conference in Kuwait on Jan. 30 in hopes of raising some of the $1.5 billion needed for humanitarian aid for the refugees and displaced Syrians over the next six months. Mr. Ban lamented that previous appeals from the United Nations had raised far less than was needed. In rebel areas, opposition forces are scrambling to raise money and broaden their donor base. Another official on Mr. Ging’s mission, Ted Chaiban, director of emergency programs for Unicef, said grass-roots activists — many of them young men and women straight out of college — were conducting most humanitarian aid efforts.
The question of an evacuation is highly sensitive in Russia, the main international supporter of Mr. Assad and his forces during almost two years of unrest that has turned into civil war. Noting that the crisis would enter its third year in March, Mr. Ban said it was time for the Security Council to overcome its disagreements on Syria.
Analysts said a full-scale evacuation would send a deeply discouraging political message to Mr. Assad, and present a logistical challenge. Last week, Russia announced that it was closing its consulate in Aleppo in the wake of a double bombing that killed 82 people, and security officials told the newspaper Kommersant last month that the authorities were prepared to send 100 armed intelligence officers to help Russian diplomats leave Damascus if necessary. “The international community, and in particular the Security Council, has a grave responsibility to act to bring the desperate suffering of the Syrian people to an end,” he said.
Russian arms manufacturers also have military advisers in place to assist the Syrian military with air-defense systems purchased from Russia. Russia and China have blocked repeated Security Council efforts to coerce Mr. Assad to step down. But Moscow has begun to publicly acknowledge Mr. Assad’s losses on the battlefield and to prepare to protect its interests during a chaotic transition. Russia’s top Middle East envoy, Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, said Tuesday that Russian negotiators were interested in establishing closer contact with “several new opposition groups, with those we have not been in touch with yet.”
The bus journey on Tuesday showed that the Syrian authorities still control the main highway to Lebanon, a crucial supply route. But elsewhere, activists reported a string of violent clashes from the south to the north of the country. “You know at first the forecasts were two to three months, four, and it is already two years,” Mr. Bogdanov told Russian news agencies, forecasting the likelihood of an even more protracted conflict .
In an indication of fresh sectarian violence, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is based in Britain and relies on a network of activists inside Syria for its information, said nine rebel soldiers had been wounded in the town of Ras al-Ain on the border with Turkey, where persistent clashes have been reported between Arabs and Kurds. About a dozen Russian warships have been sent to maneuver off the Syrian port of Tartus, where they could also help to evacuate Russians from the coastal areas where many of them live. Any decision to leave would be particularly wrenching for the tens of thousands of Russian-speaking women who met and married Syrian men who were sent to study in the former Soviet Union and who now live across Syria.
Syrian government helicopters were also said to have attacked a suburb of Dara’a in the south, where the uprising started in March 2011. Further airstrikes were reported in suburbs ringing Damascus, the capital, while militants said there had been renewed fighting near a road leading to Damascus International Airport. Nina Sergeyeva, who until recently led an organization of Russian expatriates from her home in Latakia, Syria, said that judging from Tuesday’s operation, the number of Russians seeking to leave Syria was insignificant. There is no talk of evacuation in Latakia, she said.
Farther north, government and rebel forces fought for control of areas of Homs and Aleppo. “Of course it is a kind of sign, a sign that it is really scary and dangerous there, that what’s going on there is a civil war,” said Ms. Sergeyeva, who is currently in Russia. “It’s a sign that things are getting fanned up. There are so many ships in the Mediterranean Sea, and it’s such a dead-end situation Syria — there is no political dialogue — that it is necessary to figure out the ways to get Russians out.”

Hania Mourtada contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.

Russian women who have remained in Syria up until this point have compelling reasons to stay, she said, but a formal evacuation announcement would have a powerful impact. If that happens, she said, “Russian women will understand that this is the last airplane which will take them home for free, with their children.”
The sea route is secure, but evacuations from Damascus are likely to become increasingly difficult as fighting around the airport worsens, and there is a danger that rebels may target vehicles on the overland route to the Lebanese border. Security officials told the Kommersant newspaper last month that evacuating Russian diplomats from Damascus might involve the same unit of armed foreign intelligence officers that evacuated Russians from Baghdad in 2003.
The newspaper quoted an intelligence source as saying that the officers were “ready for a transfer to Damascus; however, the order from above has not been given.” Last week, Russia announced that it was closing its consulate in Aleppo, Syria, in the wake of a double bombing that killed 82 people.
Yelena Suponina, a Moscow political analyst specializing in the Middle East, saw the departures on Tuesday as the beginning of Russia’s decision to carry out plans that officials laid out last summer. It was at that time, she said, that Russian officials “started to understand that the situation around civil war in Syria would continue and that the Syrian authorities would not find it easy to return stability. This understanding did not come now; it came some time ago.”
She said evacuations had begun because Russians in Syria were demanding passage out. “This isn’t about politics,” she said. “The worse the situation becomes, the more people will want to leave.”

Ellen Barry reported from Moscow, and Hania Mourtada from Beirut, Lebanon. Andrew Roth contributed reporting from Moscow, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.