{"id":5352,"date":"2015-09-16T13:51:51","date_gmt":"2015-09-16T13:51:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/informnapalm.org\/en\/?p=5352"},"modified":"2016-03-17T10:21:46","modified_gmt":"2016-03-17T10:21:46","slug":"war-in-syria-how-the-russian-navy-helps-bashar-assad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/informnapalm.org\/en\/war-in-syria-how-the-russian-navy-helps-bashar-assad\/","title":{"rendered":"War in Syria: How the Russian Navy helps Bashar Assad"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Syrian\u00a0government forces have relatively\u00a0successfully fought against several opponents (Syrian rebels, moderate\u00a0Islamists, Syrian Kurds and ISIS) for five years already. The territory controlled by Bashar al-Assad decreases each year, but the regime still preserves the power thanks largely to the economic and military support of the Russian Federation. The InformNapalm team decided to demonstrate\u00a0the traffic\u00a0statistics of\u00a0various Russian fleets’s warships in the Syrian port of Tartus. This article contains the results of the investigation of Anton Pavlushko, our OSINT-expert, who made an extensive analysis and prepared several tables with the times, periods, expeditions count and the list of the Russian Navy’s transport warships\u00a0involved into military cargoes deployment to Syria (direct link – http:\/\/bit.ly\/VovaHelpingBasharEN<\/a><\/strong>).<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the reasons of this long-running conflict is Assad’s regime’s “endless war reserves” which Russia\u00a0constantly refills both by air and by sea. The air traffic is limited nowadays, but the sea traffic remains a robust\u00a0life-line for Bashar.<\/p>\n

The main role in the military cargoes transfer to Syria<\/strong>\u00a0is played by Russia’s Black Sea Fleet<\/strong>\u00a0(the home base is located in Sevastopol, occupied Crimea, Ukraine).<\/p>\n

Theoretically, Russia could have established the military smuggling\u00a0to Syria with the help of\u00a0civil ships, but the first freight inspection would provoke an international scandal – that is why the Navy’s warships are used for the convoys. The traffic to the Syrian port goes through the\u00a0Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits.<\/p>\n

The warships cannot be revised and the\u00a0passing of the straits is the subject to\u00a0Montreux Convention<\/a>\u00a0from 1936 and requires only a notification of the Turkish authorities about the coming event.<\/p>\n

In this way, the Russian landing platform\/docks<\/a> (LPDs) are used for military equipment and troops transfer\u00a0to Syria. The Black Sea fleet<\/strong> has 7 LPDs as part of the 197th landing ship brigade.<\/p>\n