Putin.

MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Russia could scale up its military presence in Syria again within hours and would still bomb terrorist groups there despite a partial draw-down of forces ordered after military successes.

Speaking in one of the Kremlin’s grandest halls three days after he ordered Russian forces to partially withdraw from Syria, the Russian leader said the smaller strike force he had left behind was big enough to help forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad keep advancing.

“I’m sure that we will see new and serious successes in the near future,” Putin told an audience of more than 700 members of the military at an awards ceremony. In particular, he said he hoped that the ancient city of Palmyra, which is held by ISIS, would soon fall to Assad’s forces.

“I hope that this pearl of world civilization, or at least what’s left of it after bandits have held sway there, will be returned to the Syrian people and the entire world,” Putin said, referring to the World Heritage Site.

In his first public remarks since ordering the withdrawal, Putin for the first time put an approximate price tag on the Russian operation, saying that the bulk of the expenses – 33 billion rubles ($481.89 million) – had been taken from the defense ministry’s war games budget.

There would be other costs, he said, in order to replace ammunition and weapons as well as to make repairs.

Putin said he did not want to have to escalate Russia’s involvement in the conflict again after the draw-down and was hoping peace talks would be successful. But he made clear Russia could easily scale up its forces once more.

“The effective work of our military created the conditions for the start of the peace process,” Putin said earlier in the week.

Nabil Haissam, The Arab American News correspondent in Beirut, said Moscow had met most of its strategic and military objectives in Syria and was relieving itself of the economic and political coasts of the war. 

“The Russian intervention, followed by the partial withdrawal, will lay the ground for a political solution according to the Russian vision,” he said. “It is not a coincidence that Putin’s decision came on the same day as the start of another round of negotiations in Geneva. The peace talks would not have even begun if it were not for the Russian military campaign that altered the balance of power on the ground in favor of the Syrian army. This is what forced the opposition to let go of its stubborn preconditions, agree to a ceasefire and head to Geneva.”