Why did Ukraine and Syria restore diplomatic ties in 2025?
A look back at the restoration of relations announced on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, and a related airspace decision in Lithuania.
What did it take to bring Kyiv and Damascus back to the same table? By 25 September 2025, the answer had been given a day earlier in New York: Ukraine and Syria restored diplomatic relations as Presidents Ahmed al-Sharaa and Volodymyr Zelenskyy met on the sidelines of the eightieth session of the United Nations General Assembly.
The break dated to 2022. Ukraine severed ties with Syria after the government of Bashar al-Assad recognised the Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine's east. The Ukrainian-language announcement of the restoration, reported on 24 September 2025, described the earlier decision as recognition of the independence of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics in June 2022, and described those entities as terrorist.
The meeting in New York thus closed a gap that had lasted more than three years, and it did so on a multilateral stage rather than in either capital.
A parallel airspace decision
On 23 September 2025, a separate development in the region concerned the security of airspace. Lithuania's parliament authorised its military to shoot down any unauthorised drones in its airspace, following recent incursions by Russian drones. Until then, only drones judged to be armed, or to pose an imminent threat to critical state assets, could be targeted.
The two items were unrelated in substance, but they appeared within a day of each other. One reflected diplomatic repair after the 2022 rupture; the other reflected tightened rules on the ground as drones from Russia entered a neighbouring country's skies.
