Lucie Parsaghian/European Pressphoto Agency
Russian nationals who were evacuated from Damascus at the Masnaa border with Lebanon on Tuesday.
MOSCOW — About 80 Russian citizens crossed the Syrian border into Lebanon, boarded government-chartered planes and flew to Moscow on Tuesday, a small-scale evacuation that may signal the dwindling Russian hopes that President Bashar al-Assad will regain control of the country. The move came as a United Nations’ humanitarian official emerged after a rare mission through the conflict zone to express shock at the scale of devastation.
Russia took pains to issue assurances that the departures of its citizens was not a large-scale evacuation, seeking to avoid sending a dire message to Mr. Assad and his circle. One top Foreign Ministry official said that the two Emergency Services planes had been sent to Beirut to deliver humanitarian aid and had simply offered a free trip to Russia for those “wishing to go.”
The number of people who left was small, considering that more than 30,000 Russians are believed to live in Syria. Still, the flights had symbolic weight.
“Now we have reached this stage when everything gradually falls apart, and this is one of the manifestations,” said Aleksandr Shumilin, a Middle East analyst at the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute for Canada and the United States. “It is an important moment and important signal and an important fact. But it is formulated like a small, private incident.”
Briefing reporters in Beirut, Lebanon, the United Nations humanitarian official, John Ging, said conditions inside Syria were “appalling” and that he was “shocked on so many levels” by the scarcity of food, medication, clean water and sanitation. The United Nations mission, which was given access by both pro-government and rebel forces, found that after 22 months of conflict, Syria’s grain production had been cut in half, with many farmers unable to harvest because they could safely reach their land.
“Every mother we met was appealing for us to understand the effects of this conflict on their children,” Mr. Ging said.
He said Syrians’ primary concern was to find a way to end the conflict. “We appeal to those who do have the political power to end this,” he said.
But a negotiated solution appears no closer. Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations’ secretary general, told a news conference at his New York headquarters that after discussions with Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations and Arab League envoy seeking to negotiate a political transition, that he was not optimistic.
“The situation is very dire, very difficult,” Mr. Ban said of the bitter fighting, in which roughly 60,000 people have died. “We don’t see much prospect of a resolution at this time.”
The United Nations is helping organize a donor conference in Kuwait on Jan. 30 in hopes of raising some of the $1.5 billion needed for humanitarian aid for the refugees and displaced Syrians over the next six months. Mr. Ban lamented that previous appeals from the United Nations had raised far less than was needed. In rebel areas, opposition forces are scrambling to raise money and broaden their donor base. Another official on Mr. Ging’s mission, Ted Chaiban, director of emergency programs for Unicef, said grass-roots activists — many of them young men and women straight out of college — were conducting most humanitarian aid efforts.
Noting that the crisis would enter its third year in March, Mr. Ban said it was time for the Security Council to overcome its disagreements on Syria.
“The international community, and in particular the Security Council, has a grave responsibility to act to bring the desperate suffering of the Syrian people to an end,” he said.
Russia and China have blocked repeated Security Council efforts to coerce Mr. Assad to step down. But Moscow has begun to publicly acknowledge Mr. Assad’s losses on the battlefield and to prepare to protect its interests during a chaotic transition. Russia’s top Middle East envoy, Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, said Tuesday that Russian negotiators were interested in establishing closer contact with “several new opposition groups, with those we have not been in touch with yet.”
“You know at first the forecasts were two to three months, four, and it is already two years,” Mr. Bogdanov told Russian news agencies, forecasting the likelihood of an even more protracted conflict .
About a dozen Russian warships have been sent to maneuver off the Syrian port of Tartus, where they could also help to evacuate Russians from the coastal areas where many of them live. Any decision to leave would be particularly wrenching for the tens of thousands of Russian-speaking women who met and married Syrian men who were sent to study in the former Soviet Union and who now live across Syria.
Nina Sergeyeva, who until recently led an organization of Russian expatriates from her home in Latakia, Syria, said that judging from Tuesday’s operation, the number of Russians seeking to leave Syria was insignificant. There is no talk of evacuation in Latakia, she said.
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