Diplomacy Watch: Did Israel's war on Iran help Russia? | Responsible Statecraft |
Moscow stands to gain from the West redirecting attention and resources from Ukraine to the Middle East
As an uneasy ceasefire holds between Israel and Iran, the side effects of their destructive "12 day war" might just prove beneficial to Russia's bottom line in Ukraine.
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Israel's war on Iran May have diverted Western attention -- and military aid -- once bound for Ukraine to Israel instead, resulting in what Episkopos calls a "positive spillover effect" for Russia's war effort. Indeed, analyst Nikita Smagin told Al Jazeera that Russian leadership "counts on this scenario."
Trump's comments on possibly providing Patriot air-defense missiles for Ukraine following the recent NATO summit, where Trump explained the U.S. is also supplying such missiles to Israel, suggest as much. The Biden administration previously promised Patriot missiles in a past agreement with Ukraine.
Ukraine wants "to have the `anti-missile' missiles...the Patriots, and we're going to see if we can make some available," Trump said at a press conference following the NATO Summit. "You know, they're very hard to get. We need them too. We were supplying them to Israel."
Former British diplomat Ian Proud suggested the NATO summit's other major focus area, ramping NATO countries' defense spending up to to 5% of GDP, essentially translated into Trump "dumping" his Ukraine-war related responsibilities onto a remilitarizing Europe.
Proud noted that a third round of direct talks between Russia and Ukraine might take place as early as next week. But even if Russia and Ukraine speak directly soon, Trump's lack of patience may well spell doom for a diplomatic solution, given his administration's centrality to the talks' success.
"The bigger issue is that the Ukrainian and Russian positions remain far apart, partly because both Kyiv and Moscow think that time is on their side. These can only be bridged by the United States, but the Trump administration does not have the patience, bandwidth and expertise to see such a complex process through," Zach Paikin, deputy director of the Quincy Institute's Better Order Project and research fellow in its Grand Strategy program, told RS. "But ultimately, this doesn't change the fact that the negotiations were in trouble long before the Israel-Iran war broke out."
Paikin also said that the U.S. involvement in Israel's conflict with Iran, where the U.S. struck Iran's nuclear facilities, "has increased doubts in the Kremlin over whether Donald Trump is a trustworthy interlocutor and whether the United States is capable of getting its allies on board for diplomatic settlements."
