Live Updates:
The previous post in our Putin in Syria column can be found here.
Interfax reports that President Vladimir Putin has ordered that that the Russian Air Force begin withdrawing most of its assets from Syria tomorrow.
At a meeting with the heads of the Defense and Interior Ministries, Putin said:
“The mission, assigned to the Ministry of Defense and the Armed Forces, has been accomplished as a whole. Therefore I am ordering the defense minister, from tomorrow, to begin the withdrawal of the main part of our military deployment from the Syrian Arab Republic.”
The defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, today claimed that the Russian Air Force had succeeded in its tasks of killing more than two thousand “bandits from Russia,” cutting off supplies to “terrorists” in Syria, and “stopping the main route of oil product supplies to Turkey from Syria.”
— Pierre Vaux