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Sudan on Wednesday said it had agreed a deal for Russia to establish a naval base on the war-torn country’s Red Sea coast, marking a rare success for Moscow’s drive to expand its network of military bases in the region.
Asked about the progress of talks on the base, Sudan’s foreign minister Ali Al-Sharif said on a visit to Moscow: “We agreed, we agreed, we reached an agreement on everything.”
The Kremlin did not immediately comment on what was agreed, but a base in Sudan could offer Moscow an alternative to its naval base at Tartus in Syria, where the future of its presence is uncertain after the overthrow of its ally Bashar al-Assad.
Samuel Ramani of the Royal United Services Institute, a London think-tank, said: “A Russian Red Sea base in Sudan would ease logistical pressure on its forces in Africa, which now rely on Libya for logistics with the loss of bases in Syria.”
Russia has been linked with both sides of Sudan’s civil war since fighting erupted in 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti, a former camel herder accused of genocide by the US.
Port Sudan, near where the Russians have been hoping to establish their Red Sea base, has been the headquarters of the Sudanese army and de facto president General Abdul Fattah al-Burhan since they were driven out of the capital Khartoum in 2023.
Experts on Sudan said that given questions over the legitimacy of Burhan’s government, there would be doubts about how binding the Sudan foreign minister’s statement on the base would prove to be. It comes at a time when Burhan is aggressively shopping around for international support.
Jonas Horner, a visiting fellow at the European Council for Foreign Relations, said it would not be the first time that the Sudanese had used a prospective Russian Red Sea naval base in an attempt to focus minds in the West on what is at stake.
Russia’s interest in a naval base in Sudan has grown since Assad’s Syrian regime was overthrown in December, with Assad himself fleeing to Russia.
Russia had used the Hmeimim air base and Tartus naval base in north-western Syria as logistics hubs for operations further afield in the Middle East and Africa, such as in Libya, Mali and the Central African Republic.
But Moscow has drawn down its presence at its Syrian bases amid apparent preparations to evacuate if necessary, recent aerial photographs show.
Syria’s new government has not said whether it will allow Russia to retain its bases in the country but has requested that Moscow turn over Assad, according to a person familiar with the situation.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday spoke by phone with Syria’s interim leader Ahmed al-Sharaa and offered support for “the Syrian state’s unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity” as well as humanitarian aid, according to the Kremlin.
Russia began talks to establish a base south of Port Sudan in 2017, when former President Omar al-Bashir visited Moscow in search of support for his crumbling regime as he faced a popular uprising.
The deal comes as the Sudanese Armed Forces have succeeded in shifting momentum in the war with a series of battlefield victories. The army and allied Islamist militias are readying for a final push into the capital Khartoum after seizing once affluent northern suburbs this month.
While Russian Wagner mercenaries had fought alongside the RSF, last summer Moscow switched tactics and threw its weight behind the government.
Ramani, of Rusi, said: “Russia courted both Burhan and Hemeti so it could get a basing agreement regardless of who prevailed in Sudan’s intra-military civil war. What moved the needle appears to be Russia’s hard pivot towards supporting Burhan.”
An agreement on the naval base would bring Moscow, alongside Egypt, Qatar and other Middle Eastern states, decisively to the army’s side at a critical moment in the fighting. But the RSF still controls most of the east of the country and has its own international backers.
On Syria, foreign minister Asaad al-Shaibani told the Financial Times in January that the Assad regime had saddled the country with about $8bn in debt to Russia. Shaibani said on Wednesday that his country was looking for further reassurance from Russia and Iran, both of which are seeking to retain influence after Assad’s downfall.
“There are positive messages, but we want these positive messages to turn into a clear policy that makes the Syrian people feel reassured,” he said in Dubai.
“There are wounds among the Syrian people and there is pain that the Syrian people have suffered at the hands of these two countries.”
Additional reporting by Raya Jalabi in Beirut
