Russia's Putin and Syria's Assad met in Moscow Tuesday to discuss war

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad flew to Moscow on Tuesday for an unannounced visit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin and Syrian state media said Wednesday. It was Assad's first known trip outside Syria since he began the bloody civil war in 2011. The two leaders discussed "issues regarding the fight against terrorist and extremist groups, issues of the continuation of the Russian operation supporting the offensive of the Syrian military," said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. Russia and Syria use "terrorist" to include both Islamic State — the campaign Russian media focuses on — and Western-backed militias that pose a more immediate threat to Assad; Russia has mostly been bombing the latter group.

Putin and Assad also discussed what happens next in Syria, with Putin saying he and his advisers "believe that on the basis of positive dynamics in combat, in the end, long-term settlement will be achieved with the participation of all political forces, as well as ethnic and religious groups." The Russian leader also gave a rationale for Russia's three-week-old air campaign in Syria: "Unfortunately, people from the former Soviet republics, at least 4,000 of them, are fighting against the Syrian army.... Naturally, we cannot allow them to appear on Russian territory with all the combat experience and ideological brainwashing they have gone through."

Regardless of Putin's motives, Assad thanked him and the Russian military, according to a Kremlin transcript: "If it was not for your actions and your decisions, the terrorism which is spreading in the region would have swallowed up a much greater area and spread over an even greater area." Putin graciously replied that "the Syrian people have been putting up a fight against international terrorism effectively on its own for several years."