Memo to the Assads: Putin may welcome you in Moscow, but I wouldn't drink his tea | Marina Hyde

The Russian leader may be a warm and attentive host: he may also be cross that Assad is now his problem. But then life’s full of uncertainty, isn’t it?

It’s fair to say the TV show Schitt’s Creek would have been a lot less funny had it concerned the family of a deposed dictator rather than the family of an embezzled video store mogul. Even so, it’s a strange but undeniable fact that when toddlers are stumbling out of dungeons, and the unspeakable horrors of the former Syrian regime are still being revealed, a significant part of the human impulse is to thirst for details of the dreadful Assad family’s new lives in Moscow, then remark tartly: “Well, they’ve gone down in the world.” And of course, the Assads may yet plunge further – for all the overly impressed reports of apartments in glittering Moscow skyscrapers, I must say I’d have picked something on the ground floor myself.

For now, Syrian refugee Bashar al-Assad might be telling himself that if Vladimir Putin has offered him asylum, he can’t possibly be angry with him for putting Russia’s unrivalled network of military bases in Syria at serious risk. In which case, it’s possible Bashar is about to go on a journey of discovery as long as the Trans-Siberian railway. Then again, it could be much, much shorter. But perhaps Assad’s comfortable with limbo. He has, after all, spent the past two decades apparently unable to decide whether he is or isn’t growing a moustache. Follically speaking, I guess he now finally has time to pick a lane. Or, as I say, doesn’t have time. For while the man who used chemical weapons against his own people may be physically located in Moscow, in security terms, and for the rest of his entire life, he cannot be at all clear where he stands.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

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