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A Libyan officer said the stepped-up flights from Russia and Syria delivered military gear.
Dec. 19, 2024, 7:10 p.m. ET
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.”
