Russia’s Loss of Reputation and Status in the Middle East: Potential Consequences for Putin at Home and Abroad - PONARS Eurasia
Image credit/license PONARS EURASIA POLICY MEMO NO. 955 (PDF) Throughout 2025 Russian President Vladimir Putin remained active in the Middle East, expanding trade relations with Arab countries and strengthening Moscow’s security relationship with Iran. He also partially recovered a military basing agreement that was threatened by Syria’s December 2024 revolution. …
Imagecredit/licenseThroughout 2025 Russian President Vladimir Putin remained active in the Middle East,expandingtrade relations with Arab countries and strengthening Moscow’s security relationship with Iran. He also partially recovered a military basing agreement that was threatened by Syria’s December 2024 revolution. Yet Russia has experienced a significant loss of standing and influence in the region since the 2023 peak of its post-Soviet presence. Putin’s reputation as a reliable ally to client states and non-state groups was severely damaged by the events of 2024–2025, and the United States and Turkey have garnered significant relative power advantages over Russia, especially in Syria. The literature on personalistic autocrats like Putin suggests he will suffer few consequences at home, since his patronage network remains in place. However, two other literatures—those on prospect theory in psychology, and status politics in international relations—suggest he may become more risk-acceptant and aggressive internationally as a result of these losses. Riding High in 2023In 2023 Putin had a strong ally and client in Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. By supporting Assad in Syria’s bloody civil war, Russia made itself a necessary player in Syria’s domestic security situation, enhancing Russia’s reputation as an important global actor. The relationship also guaranteed Moscow long-term sovereign access to two crucial Syrian military bases: Tartus, Russia’s sole naval installation on the Mediterranean Sea,primarily usedfor refueling, resupply, and maintenance for its operations in Ukraine and Africa; and the air base at Khmeimim,usedfor all of Russia’s personnel and equipment deployments to Africa and for launching some missile attacks against Ukraine. Russia simultaneously strengthened its military partnership with Iran, buying Iranian drones and missiles to use against Ukraine and supporting Tehran’s Axis of Resistance allies, including the Hezbollah proxy group in Lebanon and Syria. Putin gained a potential new lever of influence with Arab populations when he choseto side withHamas, another Axis of Resistance member, against Israel following Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7. All of this bolstered Putin’s international reputation outside of the West, in spheres that he highly valued: as the leader whorestoredRussia’s global great power status in opposition to the United States,making Russiamore than just a regional power, and serving as areliablepartnerto allies in the Global South he hadassiduously cultivated. Lost Status and ReputationOver the next two years these gains were threatened. Israeli military and intelligence forces carried out decimating attacks against Hezbollah and Hamas, while Russia provided only rhetorical support to its supposed allies (despite declassified U. S. intelligence reports that air defense missile shipments to Hezbollah had beenin the works). In December 2024, Turkish-supported Islamist rebels overthrew the Assad regime in Syria—rebels targeted by Russian air poweruntil just beforetheir victory, although in the final days of the assault, according to the new Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, Putinagreedto stop fighting in return for safe passage as Russian forces fled the country. Putin gave Assad asylum in Russia but did little else. Then, in June 2025, Israel and the United States carried out unprecedented air strikes against Iran’s nuclear program and other military assets, while Russia again provided only a rhetorical response, despitereported pleas for helpfrom Tehran. Putin’s choice to abandon his Middle East allies in their time of need is not surprising, since there was little he could have done. Russia has lost the ability to commit any significant attention or resources abroad, beyond its war against Ukraine and related small-scale sabotage, cyberattacks, and airspace incursions against Ukraine’s Western supporters. Russia also stood aside as Azerbaijan drove ethnic Armenians from the long-contested region of Nagorno-Karabakh in December 2023, allowing the United States tostep inas the major peace broker in a region where Russia had long been dominant. And even though Russia’s new Africa Corps continues its relatively low-cost and low-risk deployments, Moscow now insists that African statespay cashfor its military support, rather than bartering for mineral deals as it did in the past. Its African partners have reacted with increasing skepticism about the continuing value of these relationships, especially since security gainshave been mixed. By late 2025, Putin had rebounded somewhat in Syria. Following grave uncertainty about Russia’s future military presence, in July a Syrian delegation traveled to Moscow to ask Russia toredeploy some small armed contingentsto provide stability in areas where Turkey and Israel threatened the new regime’s territorial control. In October 2025, al-Sharaa himself visited the Kremlin andagreed to upholdAssad’s prior state-to-state agreements with Russia, apparently including Russia’s no-cost, 49-year contracts for use of the military bases. Yet Russia is in asignificantly weaker positionthan it was with Assad in power: now Russian personnel must be escorted by Syria’s Internal Security Service when they travel, and Russian ships are allowed to use only one berth, with prior permission, in the port Russia used to control completely. It remains to be seen whether al-Sharaa, aformeral-Qaeda commander, will continue to allow Russia unlimited use of these bases to fight jihadists in Africa. Meanwhile, Russianeeds Iran far lessnow than it did during the early days of its war in Ukraine, because Moscow quickly set up its own factory to produce better quality Shahed drones than those provided by Iran. Iran still needs its arms sales relationship with Russia, however: In summer 2025, Iran was stilldeliveringmunitions and materiel to Russia, and as of October 2025 Rostec, Russia’s state arms export entity, waspoised to export48 advanced Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets to Tehran. After all, Russia’s January 2025 security agreement with Iran was not a mutual defense pact and did not demand that Russia help Iran. Despite Putin’s seeming ability to bounce back, Russia had clearly lost a great deal of status in the Middle East by late 2025, and Putin’s reputation as a reliable ally has been shattered. For example, Putin wasnot includedamong the 20 global leaders attempting to negotiate the Israel-Hamas ceasefire and peace process in Egypt in October 2025, where the United Statesassumedits traditional leadership role and Turkeytriedto position itself as a key player. Indeed, in November the United Nations Security Councilofficially adoptedU. S. President Donald Trump’s peace plan; Russia hadofferedan alternative, but it was forced merely to abstain from the pro-U. S. vote, given wide support for Trump’s plan amid Arab and Muslim states. Several Arab states that Moscow had attempted to cultivate during the Hamas-Israel war insteadstrengthenedtheir security relationships with Israel and the United States throughout 2024. Meanwhile in August 2025, the new Syrian regimeannouncedthat Turkey would provide military training and weapons for Syria, further reducing Russia’s relative role as a defense partner; and in November 2025, al-Sharaa visited Washington for meetings with Trump, amid reports that the United States wasestablishingits own air base in southern Syria to monitor a U. S. -brokered security deal between Damascus and Jerusalem. It wasrevealedthat the new Syrian government had been cooperating with the U. S. -led anti-Islamic State coalition from the start andmightmake that cooperation official. In other words, Syria, followingthe exampleof many other countries, is playing the great powers off against each other, and for now the United States seems to be leading the contest for influence. In sum, the relative power balance in the Middle East has shifted away from Russia, in favor of the United States and Turkey. Observant foreign actors are unlikely to see Putin as a reliable security ally given his failure to keep the Assad regime in power and his weak support for Iran and its Axis of Resistance. What will the long-term consequences likely be for Russia?Few Costs at HomeRussia today isgenerally agreedto fit the standard definitionof a personalist autocratic regime, where power is overwhelminglyconcentratedin the hands of a single individual and a small inner circle of friends and family, with weak institutional constraints on that power. The systemfunctionsthrough hierarchies of patronage. Those at the topmaintaintheir positions by distributing state protection, opportunities for corruption, and other resources to their clients, who run their own lower-level patronage networks and in turn pay the leader back with personal loyalty. Scholars havearguedanddemonstratedstatistically that these systemic attributes make personalist dictators less politically vulnerable to loss in war (for example, Russia in the Syrian civil war) than other types of leaders, including both those in democracies and those leading more bureaucratic or ruling-party autocracies. Personalist autocrats rely on a small “selectorate“ to remain in office: Power is concentrated among a chosen few who all depend on the leader for their own well-being. As long as they can keep patronage resources flowing to the inner circle, personalist autocrats can therefore afford to worry less about the views of the largely disenfranchised greater public. Meanwhile, elites know that the bargain keeping them safe and wealthy demands their personal loyalty. They are unlikely either to criticize the autocrat or to trust anyone sufficiently to attempt a coup, absent some major disruption that threatens multiple supporter networks. As a result, personalist autocratic leaders are rarely held accountable for their mistakes. This is the case even though they may make more policy errors than other types of leaders, since the sycophants surrounding them have an incentive to tell them what they want to hear, rather than challenging them or bringing bad news. The rational personalist autocrat can therefore afford to take greater risks internationally and incur greater losses than other state leaders, as long as sufficient resources are available to keep the patronage network afloat. Russia’s recent material losses in the Middle East appear too small to provoke elite fissures. One longtime Putin oligarch ally, Gennady Timchenko, did suffer financially in the downfall of the Assad regime: In January 2025, the new Syrian governmentcanceleda significant contract with Timchenko’s private Stroytransgaz (STG) firm to manage and upgrade the civilian port at Tartus, and Damascus seems to beamendinga 2018 contract that gave STG 50-year control over Syria’s enormous phosphate resources bysigninga new phosphate deal in December 2025 with Serbia’s Elixir Group, billed as the first among many. Yet Timchenkowascompensatedby Putin in 2025, with several lucrative new commercial projects in Russia as Western investors left, and with financialcontrolover Russia’s Africa Corps. Meanwhile, another Putin crony, Rostec CEO Sergei Chemezov, is likely to benefit personally from Russian contracts for continuing arms sales to Iran. Putin AbroadThe consequences of Russia’s lost status could be greater for Russia’s choices abroad. For now, Putin appears to be acting as an extraordinarily clear-thinking realist advisor would recommend: recognizing and accepting Russia’s lost status in the Middle East relative to Turkey and the United States, and taking what he can get for Russia in the new circumstances. Yet Putin is operating in what psychologists call the “domain of losses” because of events in the Middle East, and according toprospect theory, this is likely to affect his decision-making in ways that deviate from a fully rational choice approach. This school of psychology has convincingly demonstrated, through logic and experimentation, that individuals’ risk acceptance varies based on how a situation is framed, rather than remaining constant. When a situation isperceived as a loss, people will take riskier chances to try to regain what they once had, much as a gambler on a losing streakwagers more and moreto try to recoup their initial stake. (The losses need not be large for risk acceptance to increase; the phenomenon has been demonstrated repeatedly for subjects in no-cost laboratory and survey experiments. ) In other words, Putin may take more international gambles now to try to restore his lost status as an important security actor and necessary player outside of Russia’s immediate regions. Putin publiclyclaimedin December 2024 that Russia had accomplished all it set out to do in Syria and did not consider the revolution there a loss; but privately he is likely seething about what mainstream media sourcesare callingthe strongest relationship between Syria and the United States in history. It is always risky to anthropomorphize nation-states and apply findings from individual psychology to state behavior. Yet the burgeoning literature on status and international relationsfindsthat states, including Russia, are concerned about relative status and status deficits, and canreact emotionallywhen they perceive that they have lost status in comparison to a peer (in Russia’s case, the United States). These states are more likely tostart warsthey think they can win as a means to regain lost status, even when that loss is simply diplomatic status. When leadersfeel humiliatedinternationally, they may provoke conflict in geographical areas where they feel more confident of a win, even if their loss occurred elsewhere. There is no way to know for sure how these findings on status and states might apply to Putin’s Russia. Certainly, there is little Russia can now do militarily in the Middle East or other regions far from its borders, given its strained resources and focus on Ukraine. However, Russia’s recent status and influence losses in the Middle East and elsewhere may exacerbate Putin’s ongoing campaigns ofsabotageagainst Europe and escalatingairspace incursionsin Scandinavia and the Baltic states. These Russian actions have left NATO countries scrambling for solutions by exposing their weaknesses in unexpected areas, and Putin likely chalks this up as a win. Such actions may help salve his ego and the egos of his Russian supporters as reputational and status losses in the Middle East and elsewhere accrue. Putin may perceive such hybrid or gray-zone tactics as low risk, since they do not involve direct military engagement and Russia can deny its responsibility for them. Prospect theory indeed suggests that, since he is operating in the domain of losses at a global level (both in the Middle East and elsewhere beyond Ukraine), Putin may be more acceptant of risk now than he was in prior years. Yet Putin’s current actions areexacerbatingthe real dangers of escalation between Russia and the West. There are many possible explanations for Putin’s actions now, and there is no way to know for sure that Russia’s lost status and influence in the Middle East is affecting current Russian behavior toward NATO states. But two different literatures, on prospect theory and status concerns, suggest that as Putin operates in the domain of losses and Russia’s global reputation suffers, the temperature of his conflict against the West will rise. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 57thAnnual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Washington, D. C. , November 2025. I am grateful to Anna Borshchevskaya, Robert O. Freedman, Dmitry Gorenburg, Mark Katz, Carol L. Saivetz, and Gary Samore for their helpful comments and criticisms. [1]Kimberly Marten is a professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University. 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