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Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor and Christian Oliver is news director at POLITICO Europe.
Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel took place on Vladimir Putin’s birthday.
Such a catastrophic security shock in the Middle East was likely a welcome surprise for a Russian president whose strategic priority is to divert Western support and attention away from Ukraine. A massive conflagration in Israel could do just that.
The big question is how much credit can be given to the Kremlin for the perfect storm of growing crises – in Israel, Kosovo, the Caucasus and Africa – that are spreading to America and Europe. For many, it is tempting to see Putin as a mastermind or puppet master, fomenting more conflict than the West can handle.
In truth, Putin is not the cause of all these crises, but he is now happy to add fuel to the fire and exploit them to his advantage. He enjoys the chaos. The Kremlin’s arrogant propagandists are already pushing the narrative that a war in the Middle East will be a victory for Russia and that money will dry up for Ukraine.
“This was probably the best birthday present for Putin. “The attack on Israel will divide attention as the US has its natural focus on Israel,” an EU diplomat said.
“We hope that this will not have a dramatic impact on support for Ukraine, but of course a lot will also depend on the duration of the conflict in the Middle East. If we really want to be a geopolitical European Union, we must be able to manage multiple crises at the same time.”
In Washington, it is a foregone conclusion that the Hamas attacks on Israel will reduce U.S. focus on Ukraine as it reels from the fallout from last week’s ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy by a group of Republican hardliners – part of the same group. are occupied by conservatives who have sought to cut aid to Ukraine. The race to replace McCarthy is now heating up, making it harder for the Biden administration to win congressional approval for any additional aid it might want to give Israel.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, sensing the danger that the West may be losing focus on Kiev, points out that Hamas supporters Iran and Russia are close allies and contrasts the fight against Russia and the fight against militant Islamists as a unit represent the same thing. “Israeli journalists who were here in Ukraine, in Bucha, now say that they saw the same evil where Russia came. The same evil. And the only difference is that there is a terrorist organization that attacked Israel and there is a terrorist state that attacked Ukraine.”
The Kremlin is happy
How involved are the Russians?
Let’s start with the Hamas attacks. Russia has long courted the Islamist militants, and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and other officials have made recent trips to Moscow. After Saturday’s attacks, the Russians quickly dusted off old plans to return Israel’s borders to 1967 levels. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the creation of a Palestinian state was being thwarted by US “destructive policies” You could almost hear the satisfied purr as gleeful former President Dmitry Medvedev dismissed the Hamas attacks as an “expected development” and expressed his anger against the Palestinian state West directed.
“Instead of actively working on the Palestinian-Israeli solution, these are idiots [the U.S.] have interfered with us and are providing the neo-Nazis [in Ukraine] with extensive aid that pits the two closely related peoples against each other,” he sneered.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov gleefully argued that funding for Ukraine would now inevitably decline. “The process of supplying the Kiev regime with weapons will enter a downward trend from a factual, emotional, financial and technological perspective,” he said.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and other officials made recent trips to Moscow | Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images
Does this mean that Russia was directly involved in the attacks? That seems unlikely. Russia is nowhere near as important as Iran when it comes to weapons and funding for Hamas.
Norman Roule, a former senior U.S. intelligence official, argued that Moscow’s political support for Hamas encouraged the group to commit violence, but said any Russian role beyond that was likely modest. “This strategy allows the Russians to claim they support a peace process, but the resulting violence disrupts the region, diverts policymakers’ attention from Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, and draws U.S. naval forces from the Black Sea to the Eastern Mediterranean.” , he told POLITICO.
The flirtations with Hamas and support for the Palestinians are also helping Putin emerge as a key player in a global realignment against the West with countries like China and Iran. Just days ago, he said Russia’s intention was to “build a new world,” blamed the West for the war in Ukraine and said the conflict was being fought over “the principles on which the new world order will be based.”
Russia’s ally and main military supplier abroad, Iran, certainly also wants a new world order, but it is questionable how directly Tehran gives concrete orders to Hamas. Roule doubted that Tehran was involved in the operational planning of the attack. But that “misunderstands how Iran operates, what role it plays and how it uses proxies,” he said. Iran “creates a Frankenstein monster and then unleashes it on a village.”
This approach to heating up global geopolitics suits Russia well.
Crisis in the Caucasus
Nagorno-Karabakh in the South Caucasus is another flashpoint where Putin’s critics accuse him of deliberately fomenting a crisis that led to more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians being expelled after a 24-hour military attack by Azerbaijan on September 19 and 20 had to flee their ancestral homeland.
Nagorno-Karabakh in the South Caucasus is another flashpoint where Putin’s critics accuse him of deliberately fomenting a crisis Tofik Babaye/AFP via Getty Images
Here too it is a complex picture. In some circles, the disaster was seen as a sign of Russian weakness – that Moscow could no longer guarantee the security of Armenians in the face of an attack by Turkish-backed Azerbaijan.
Russia, on the other hand, is trying to suggest that it has intentionally stopped supporting the Karabakh Armenians and is thereby putting pressure on the US and EU to help with the refugee flight. The message from Moscow is that it is punishing and abandoning Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan for straying from his alliance with Russia and trying to push his country toward a more Western course.
In this case, it is more likely that Putin played a role. Few experienced observers believe it is conceivable that Azerbaijan would have sent its troops without a green light from Moscow – or without the Russians smoothing things over with Tehran, a traditional enemy of Azerbaijan that has long expressed fears about border changes in the South Caucasus.
Coincidentally or not, while the Azerbaijani forces were advancing, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu was in Tehran for talks with senior Iranian military and security officials, including Mohammad Bagheri, the Iranian Armed Forces’ chief of staff, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ aerospace chief Amir Ali Hajizadeh.
It is not too plausible to believe that Nagorno-Karabakh came up in the discussions.
European Council President Charles Michel also left little doubt that he believes the disaster in the Caucasus was Putin’s fault, saying Armenians had been “betrayed” by the inaction of Russian peacekeepers.
Balkan Imbroglio
Four days after Azerbaijan captured Nagorno-Karabakh, it was the Balkans’ turn with a brazen and astonishing clash between armed Serbs and police in the village of Banjska in the municipality of Zvečan in northern Kosovo. Kosovo has accused Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić of ordering the attack, while others see the hand of far-right Serbian ultranationalists with close ties to Moscow.
European Council President Charles Michel also leaves little doubt that he believes the disaster in the Caucasus was Putin’s fault, saying Armenians had been “betrayed” by the inaction of Russian peacekeepers Mikhail Metzel/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Kosovars and Albanians have long argued that Russia is the main force in trying to spark a new war in the Balkans. Just last month, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama said Russia was using tensions over Kosovo to justify its “neo-imperial dreams.”
Whether Putin intervenes directly or not, a flare-up in the Balkans would clearly be in Russia’s interest and would represent another major distraction for a weary West already struggling to maintain its coherence and unity.
In 2018, in testimony before a congressional panel, Henry Kissinger, a former U.S. secretary of state well versed in geopolitical machinations, rejected the idea that all “individual crises in different regions” were merely the result of coincidence.
The “traditional patterns of great power rivalry are returning,” he warned at the time.
Barbara Moens and Veronika Melkozerova contributed reporting