Vladimir Putin made one very telling remark about Syria which has revealed the “strain” the ousting of Bashar al-Assad has on the Kremlin, an official has said.

Syria’s authoritarian leader was kicked out of power earlier this month after a remarkable rebellion and is now receiving asylum in Russia.

It was a major humiliation for Putin as well as Assad because Russia had been propping up the regime for the last nine years so the Kremlin could maintain a stronghold in the Middle East.

But, preoccupied by Ukraine, Russia chose not to come to Assad’s aid when the lightning offensive started in December.

Putin then played down Russia’s failure at a news conference on Thursday when he made his first public comments on the subject.

He said: “You want to portray everything that is happening in Syria as some kind of failure, a defeat for Russia. I assure you, it is not.”

But, speaking to HuffPost UK, a Western official said this comment was particularly telling.

They said: “That’s certainly indicative of the strain there, and it’ll be interesting how that plays out.”

The Russian president also said he had not yet met Assad since he moved to Russia, but that he would do at some point, and claimed Moscow had helped prevent Syria becoming a “terrorist enclave” when it aided the oppressive regime.

He also claimed that Israel was the “main beneficiary” of the rebellion as the IDF moved into Syrian land near the border.

The Russian president used the extended news conference to talk about the two military bases Russia has in Syria too, saying: “We maintain relations with all the groups that control the situation there... the vast majority of them tell us that they would be interested in our military bases remaining in Syria.”

He added: “I don’t know. We have to think about this because we must assess our relations with those political forces that are in control and will be in control of the situation in the future.”