Ricketts Questions Middle East, Syria Experts Following Fall of Assad Regime

February 13, 2025 WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts (R-NE) participated in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing focused on better understanding the impacts of Middle East regional politics, and the residual effects the fall of the Assad regime in Syria may have on American interests as it pertains to Russia, Türkiye and Iran. Senator Ricketts said the following during the hearing: Click on the photo to watch “As we see what’s unfolding in Syria, we know that the ramifications are from Putin’s war in Russia. There’s miscalculation. There is rippling through the system. We see it in Nagorno-Karabakh, we see it here in Syria. How he [Putin] was not able to support the Assad regime. But we know in years past that Russia was critical to keeping Assad afloat and basically responsible for killing Syrians,” Sen. Ricketts said. “They’ve been getting that historically from Russia, but recently we’ve been reading reports that the Europeans have been in conversation with al-Sharaa about, again, lifting some of the sanctions and one of the conditions being kicking the Russians basically out of their naval base and the air base.”