MOSCOW -- If Syrian President Bashar Assad ever feels the need to flee Damascus, he may be able to claim asylum in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested in an interview released Tuesday.
The Russian leader said that it was premature to discuss asylum for Assad if he were pushed from office in the nearly five-year-long conflict in Syria. But Putin said that "we granted asylum to Mr. Snowden, which was far more difficult than to do the same for Mr. al-Assad."
Putin was referring to Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who fled to Moscow after releasing reams of classified documents about U.S. surveillance programs. Snowden was granted asylum in Russia in 2013.
The Kremlin is one of Assad's strongest foreign backers, and Russian airstrikes have pummeled Syrian opposition forces since the end of September, bolstering the beleaguered Assad regime. But Putin has long been said to take a dim view of Assad himself, an ophthalmologist-turned-president who has been engaged in a brutal civil war since the Arab Spring protests of early 2011.
Syria has been the Kremlin's biggest ally in the Middle East since the Soviet era, and Russia has maintained a naval base in Latakia for decades.
In the interview, conducted with Germany's Bild newspaper Jan. 5 but released in part on the Kremlin website on Tuesday, Putin declined an opportunity to call Assad an "ally," saying that "this is a rather subtle issue."
"I think that President al-Assad has made many mistakes in the course of the Syrian conflict," Putin said. He called for a new constitution in Syria, followed by early elections. "It is the Syrian people themselves who must decide who and how should run their country," he said.
Assad also has expressed willingness to hold new elections if opposition forces put away their weapons, a promise that rebels say is disingenuous coming from a man whose troops drop barrel bombs on civilians.
If Assad were to flee to Moscow, he would be joining a club that includes Ukraine's deposed President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia in February 2014 after being ousted by street protests.
Assad made a rare visit to Moscow in October, his first publicly disclosed trip abroad since the Syrian protests erupted in 2011.
Russia recently granted its second-highest state decoration to Syrian Col. Suheil al-Hassan, a battlefield commander who has been seen as a potential rival to Assad himself. Russia's state-run Sputnik news agency reported Tuesday that the Syrian officer had been awarded the Order of Friendship at an air base outside Latakia from which Russia has been conducting airstrikes.
Information for this article was contributed by Hugh Naylor of The Washington Post.
A Section on 01/13/2016