MOSCOW, Dec 10, 2024 (AFP) - Syria's Bashar al-Assad has found refuge with his family in Russia, joining a growing band of authoritarian leaders and exiles who have sought sanctuary in Moscow.

- Bashar al-Assad -
Assad fled the country for Russia with his family after a lightning offensive by a coalition of rebels, according to the official Russian news agencies RIA Novosti and TASS on Sunday.

They reportedly arrived in Moscow on Sunday evening after being granted asylum but there was no word about their exact whereabouts or how many family members accompanied Assad.

The Kremlin has refused to comment.

A possible flight to Russia was previously mooted after civil war broke out in Syria in 2011, and especially before Russia's military intervention in 2015, which allowed Assad to stay in power.

In April 2014, when Assad was struggling against rebel forces, a former senior Russian official, Sergei Stepashin, met him in Damascus.

Stepashin said the Syrian leader at the time had given him a message.
"Tell Vladimir Vladimirovich (Putin) that I am not Yanukovych and that I am not going anywhere," he reportedly said, referring to the Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in 2014.

- Viktor Yanukovych -
The pro-Russian former Ukrainian president fled in February 2014 after the death of about 100 people in an attempt to suppress the Maidan Revolution protest movement, which brought a pro-Western government to power.

Soon afterwards, Russia annexed Crimea and backed pro-Russian separatists opposed to Kyiv in eastern Ukraine.

Yanukovych maintained he was the victim of a coup. He was taken out of Ukraine by military officers loyal to him.

He has not commented on Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine that began on February 24, 2022. President Volodymyr Zelensky stripped him of his Ukrainian citizenship in February 2023.

- Edward Snowden -
Snowden, wanted by Washington for leaking tens of thousands of classified National Security Agency documents detailing US surveillance programmes, has been in Russia since June 2013.

He tried, but failed, to reach Cuba and several Latin American countries. Putin granted him Russian citizenship in 2022.

Snowden, who lives in Russia with his wife, Lindsay Mills, and their two sons, has said becoming Russian would help provide stability for his family.

- Askar Akayev -
Elected president of Kyrgyzstan after independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Askar Akayev was toppled in 2005 in the so-called "Tulip Revolution" and fled to Russia.

A trained scientist, he now teaches at Moscow State University.
Despite being stripped of his presidential status, he was not prosecuted and was allowed to return to Kyrgyzstan, visiting at least once, in 2021.
Akayev's successor, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, was also ousted from power in an uprising in 2010. He lives in exile in Belarus, a Russian ally.
- Milosevic family -

Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic was removed from power in 2000 and extradited to be tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, where he died in 2006.

His wife, Mirjana Markovic, and their son, Marko, settled in Russia. She died there in 2019.