Glad Europe sees the Putin play now.

[Celerity]

3. The Tartus naval base was the biggest reason Putin backed Assad.

The Tartus naval base was a leased military installation of the Russian Navy located on the northern edge of the sea port of the Syrian city of Tartus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartus_naval_base

Established in 1971, during the Cold War, by an agreement between the Soviet Union and Ba'athist Syria, the facility supported the Soviet Navy's 5th Operational Squadron, its Mediterranean fleet. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the facility remained in limited use by Russia's Black Sea Fleet. From 2009, the facility was upgraded and expanded, including to serve the Mediterranean Sea Task Force formed in 2013. From 2011, it was the only remaining Russian naval base outside the former Soviet Union. From 2015, the base supported the Russian intervention in the Syrian civil war. In 2017 Russia concluded an agreement with Syria, obtaining a free-of-charge 49-year lease, jurisdiction over the base, and the ability to store nuclear weapons aboard its ships.

In December 2024, following the fall of the Assad regime, the Russian Navy began withdrawing from the base, completing this by early March 2025. In January 2025, the Syrian caretaker government ended the treaty allowing Russian military presence in Syria, and a contract with Russian company Stroytransgaz to manage the commercial areas of the Tartus port. In February, the Syrian defence minister Murhaf Abu Qasra stated that Russia would be allowed to maintain the base "if we get benefits for Syria out of this".

snip

btw, you said:

For sure Putin wanted Assad to succeed to built a bad axis of nations, but sending masses of refugees to Europe was a way to destabilize those European nations and grow the right wing networks. It partially worked.

The US did the same, but with even greater impact, via Bush's illegal Iraq War. (and before that multiple other CIA-led or aided murder wars and coups d'état, going back to at least Operation Ajax, the 1953 CIA/MI6 coup of the democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran (and the re-centralisation of power under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's brutal regime, which ultimately led to the Iranian Islamic Revolution and the take-over by Ruhollah Khomeini). The 1973 CIA-greatly aided murder war/coup of Salvador Allende is another.