MOSCOW — If Syrian President Bashar Assad ever feels the need to flee the hot winds of Damascus, he may be able to claim asylum in frigid Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin hinted in an interview released Tuesday.

The Russian leader said that it was premature to discuss asylum for Assad if he were pushed from office in the nearly five-year-long conflict in Syria. But Putin said that ‘‘we granted asylum to Mr. Snowden, which was far more difficult than to do the same for Mr. al-Assad.’’

Putin was referring to Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who fled to Moscow after releasing reams of classified documents about US surveillance programs. Snowden was granted asylum in Russia in 2013.

The Kremlin is one of Assad’s strongest foreign backers, and Russian airstrikes have pummeled Syrian opposition forces since the end of September, bolstering the beleaguered Assad regime. But Putin has long been said to take a dim view of Assad himself, an ophthalmologist-turned-president who has been engaged in a brutal civil war since the Arab Spring protests of early 2011.

Dating back to the Soviet era, Syria has been the Kremlin’s biggest ally in the Middle East, and Russia has maintained a naval base in Latakia for decades.

Putin’s surprise intervention in Syria was seen as an effort to prop up a faltering friend, and also to give Russia a seat at the table in any negotiations about the future of the country.

If Assad were to flee to Moscow, he would be joining a club that includes Ukraine’s deposed president, Viktor Yanukovych, who escaped to Russia in February 2014 after being ousted by street protests.