With the fate of its military bases in Syria uncertain, Russia has been sending cargo planes in recent days to Libya, where it also maintains a military foothold in the Middle East, Libyan officers said.
A military official at al-Khadim air base in eastern Libya said that a half-dozen Russian planes — some coming from Russia and some from Syria — had arrived carrying military equipment since Dec. 8, when Syrian rebels overthrew Russia’s ally, Bashar al-Assad.
The nature of their cargo could not be confirmed independently, but publicly available flight records show heavier than usual traffic in the past week between Russia or Belarus and Libya’s east, which is controlled by a Kremlin-backed military leader.
At least four Russian Il-76 cargo planes have made trips from Moscow or Minsk to Benghazi, in eastern Libya, and back since last Thursday.
Russia’s bases in western Syria — a major naval base and an air base — have been crucial to its ability to project power in the Middle East. Moscow has been negotiating with Syria’s new leaders to keep its bases there, but so far there has been no agreement.
“We’ll need to decide for ourselves how our relationships will look with those political forces that now control and will control the situation in the country in the future,” President Vladimir V. Putin said on Thursday in his year-end news conference. “Our interests need to coincide.”
A report published on Thursday by the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project said that the flights to Libya were “likely setting conditions for Russia to mitigate or replace its reliance on its Syrian bases by upgrading Russian positions in Libya.”
A civil war carved Libya into quasi-states with rival armed forces before ending in a stalemate four years ago. As in the Syrian civil war, both Turkey and Russia committed their armed forces to the fight, supporting opposing sides.
The faction backed by Turkey controls the northwest, including the capital, Tripoli. It is the successor to a government that was created with United Nations mediation and received international recognition, but whose U.N. mandate has expired. Another, led by Gen. Khalifa Hifter, holds power in the northeast, is backed by Russia and has also received support from the United Arab Emirates and Egypt.
The Libyan officer said the Russian flights arrived with little notice: The air base where they landed was informed only when they were already in the air. He spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military information.
In addition, the day the Syrian rebels seized Damascus, the capital, several civilian planes flying from Damascus landed in Benghazi, the de facto capital of eastern Libya, the officer said.
The leader of the rival government in western Libya, Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, on Thursday condemned Russia’s moves, saying that transferring more weaponry to Libya posed “a real threat to peace and security in the country.” But Mr. Dbeibah has no control over what happens in the East.
Speaking on a panel during the Libyan Government Communication Forum, he warned that “Libya is not an arena for the conjunction of international interests,” according to Sky News Arabia, which moderated the panel.
Two flightsoperated by Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry took off one after the other in the early hours of Dec. 13, both reaching Benghazi just before the planes stopped sharing their location, according to data from FlightRadar24, a real-time flight tracking website.
One of them listed Moscow as its departure airport, the other did not list either the departure airport or the destination.
Last Thursday and Saturday, a U.S.-sanctioned Belarusian cargo company sent two Il-76 planes from the Belarusian capital, Minsk, that did not list their destination. But the publicly available flight paths showed the planes reaching Benghazi before the route sharing was interrupted.
RubiStar, the Belarusian company that operated the flights, was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in August for its role helping to support the Russian war in Ukraine.
The sanctions designation accused RubiStar of “providing mission support to Russia by transporting Russian military personnel to Africa” as well as the shipment of military helicopters to Africa.
Russia used Belarus as a staging ground for the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and still keeps significant military equipment and weapons stockpiles there.
Within days of the fall of the Assad regime, journalists and civilians posting to social media spotted several columns of Russian military equipment driving from Damascus toward Russia’s Khmeimim air base and naval base at Tartus.
Images from the satellite company Maxar earlier this week showed Russian military vehicles and equipment pulling out of Khmeimim, apparently headed for Tartus.
One image from Sunday showed several dozen military trucks and armored personnel carriers, as well as people, assembled on the tarmac at Kheimim, with an Il-76 cargo plane standing nearby.
Another image, from last Friday, shows two An-124 heavy transport planes with their nose cones raised. Analysis by The New York Times showed a Ka-52 attack helicopter being dismantled, as it would be before being loaded onto such a plane, and an S-400 air defense system nearby.
Other satellite images on Tuesday showed dozens of trucks and personnel carriers crammed into Russia’s naval base in Tartus.
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