Russia Emerges as a Center of Gravity for Israel: Yury Barmin, Al-Monitor, Nov. 7, 2016 — As Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev prepares to visit Israel and Palestine on Nov. 9-11 to facilitate peace negotiations, Russia and Israel find themselves recovering from a diplomatic spat that could not only have derailed those attempts but also soured their relationship.
Russia's Growing Middle Eastern Prowess: Anna Borshchevskaya, Middle East Forum, Nov. 17, 2016 — Moscow's military intervention in Syria has not only made it a key factor in that country's civil war but has also boosted its regional standing, netted it a major naval outlet in the Eastern Mediterranean, and exacerbated Europe's domestic problems by accelerating the refugee outpour into the Continent.
Beware the Hungry Bear: Norman A. Bailey, Asia Times, Nov. 17, 2016 — With the world’s attention fixed on the astonishing victory of Donald Trump in the American presidential election, grossly insufficient attention is being paid to another and potentially very dangerous development.
‘Winter Is Coming,’ by Garry Kasparov: Serge Schmemann, New York Times, Nov. 2, 2016 — Russians in positions of power tend to measure their country’s standing in the world against the United States, longing to be recognized as equally important and powerful and getting very angry when they’re not so treated.
Israeli Official: Russia Has Long-Term Ambitions in the Middle East: Jerusalem Post, Nov. 16, 2016
Is Russia More Dangerous than ISIS?: Michael Rubin, Commentary, Nov. 21, 2016
Tip of the Iceberg: Russian Use of Power in Syria: Maj. Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror, BESA, Oct. 9, 2016
A Trump-Putin Axis?: Neville Teller, Jerusalem Post, Nov. 24, 2016
RUSSIA EMERGES AS A CENTER OF GRAVITY FOR ISRAEL
Yury Barmin
Al-Monitor, Nov. 7, 2016
As Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev prepares to visit Israel and Palestine on Nov. 9-11 to facilitate peace negotiations, Russia and Israel find themselves recovering from a diplomatic spat that could not only have derailed those attempts but also soured their relationship. On Oct. 13, UNESCO adopted a controversial resolution that criticizes Israel’s “escalating aggression” regarding a holy site in Jerusalem known as the Temple Mount to Jews and Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary) to Muslims. The resolution, which was backed by Russia, refers to the holy site only by its Arab name, which understandably infuriated Jerusalem.
A week later, on Oct. 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to congratulate him on his birthday. According to Israeli sources, Netanyahu expressed his disappointment at Russia’s support for the “anti-Israel” UNESCO resolution and protested the move. Putin had to go to great lengths to cushion the blow, eventually dispatching a high-level Foreign Ministry delegation to Jerusalem to explain the Russian position on the UNESCO vote.
Remarkably, incidents like this are uncharacteristic of the general understanding Israel and Russia enjoy across a variety of contexts. Netanyahu might not have been happy to see Russian Sukhoi Su fighter jets interfere in the already-complex Syrian equation, but evidently he found certain benefits in it. Russia and Israel, despite their different visions of a post-war Syria, have one thing in common: Neither wants to see more governments being destabilized in the Middle East, because at the end of the day the spillover of instability threatens them both.
Regarding the Syrian war, Israel’s interests are shaped around guarding its borders from a multitude of perceived threats, including Hezbollah incursions and the group’s growing strength; the Syrian government’s claims to the Golan Heights; Sunni rebels developing military infrastructure along Israel’s borders; and most importantly, attacks by Iran. In this context, the physical presence of Russian forces in Syria may not necessarily be against Israel’s own interests, as it may help contain these threats.
The involvement of Russian officers in Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s military planning will discourage Damascus from taking any action against Israel, which is as good a guarantee as Netanyahu can expect in current circumstances. The Israeli prime minister traveled to Russia twice this year and insists that he received assurances from Putin that the country’s borders would not be violated in the course of the ongoing war, something Washington, Israel’s closest ally, is presently unable to guarantee. To that end, Moscow and Jerusalem have agreed to coordinate their actions in Syria as well as share intelligence.
Despite occasional cross-border operations, Israel would like to avoid interfering militarily in Syria due to the high risk of being drawn in deeper or provoking retaliation. Intelligence-sharing also greatly benefits Moscow, which receives more balanced intelligence, allowing it to put into perspective the kind of information provided by its allies from the Baghdad coordination center. Initial stages of the Russian operation in Syria showed that intelligence gathered by Damascus and Tehran was not always accurate.
It's not so much Assad that worries Israel, but rather Iran's influence on Assad. Containing Tehran and its allies in the region, including the Syrian leader and Hezbollah, is the endgame for Jerusalem at the moment. Controlling the arms flow to Hezbollah fighters is part of the effort to contain unfriendly forces, and Russia is instrumental in achieving this. After Russia increased its aid to the Syrian government in mid-2014, Israel noticed a spike in deliveries of surface-to-surface missiles to Hezbollah. Jerusalem demanded that the Kremlin control weapons turnover in Syria.
Some sources in Israeli diplomatic circles told Al-Monitor that Russia went as far as to intentionally delay the delivery of S-300 missile systems to Iran for breaking its promise not to transfer Russian weapons to Hezbollah. These incidents encouraged Moscow and Jerusalem to reach an agreement whereby Israel reserves the right to attack Hezbollah convoys carrying weapons that could potentially be used against it, and Russia received assurances that as long as Israel’s territory is not threatened, Israel will refrain from a military intervention in Syria.
Beyond Syria, however, Russia’s influence in the Middle East remains limited. The role Moscow plays in this conflict is the reason its opinion matters to policymakers in the region. Having invested so much effort and money trying to resolve the Syrian crisis, Putin would see it as his own geopolitical loss if he couldn’t cement Russia’s influence in the region beyond the conflict. With this in mind, Russia is actively looking for other entry points that could move it into a position as a key decision-maker in the Middle East in the long run. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one such point.
The first signs that Russia’s vision of its role in the Middle East is evolving came in late 2015. Two months into Russia's military campaign in Syria, Putin changed the leading figures: The Foreign Ministry and Putin’s Mideast envoy, Mikhail Bogdanov, were sidelined, and the military intelligence circles came to the fore. As a diplomat in Moscow confirmed to Al-Monitor, Bogdanov was charged with handling a number of “second-tier” issues related to the Middle East where Russia could act as a mediator, including the crises in Yemen and Libya, as well as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In Russia’s view, the impasse in the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks since 2014 presents a perfect opportunity for it to spearhead a renewed diplomatic effort. Given the problems with past rounds of talks, the Kremlin is cautious in its ambitions but has proposed to host Netanyahu and Abbas in Moscow for direct talks, to which both reportedly have agreed. Russia is unlikely to break the impasse between Israelis and Palestinians, but Jerusalem will play along anyway. The cases of Syria and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict indicate that the United States could be gradually retreating from the Middle East, which would mean that US partners in the region might have to seek new alliances. While remaining wary of Russia’s intentions in the Middle East, Israel may have no choice but to gravitate toward Moscow.
RUSSIA'S GROWING MIDDLE EASTERN PROWESS
Anna Borshchevskaya
Middle East Forum, Nov. 17, 2016
Moscow's military intervention in Syria has not only made it a key factor in that country's civil war but has also boosted its regional standing, netted it a major naval outlet in the Eastern Mediterranean, and exacerbated Europe's domestic problems by accelerating the refugee outpour into the Continent.
While minimizing the Middle East's sectarian divide and portraying its intervention as support for the Syrian government's legitimate fight against terrorists, Moscow has effectively backed a Shiite, anti-Sunni bloc by aligning itself with Tehran – a historic-enemy-turned-ally in opposition to Western regional interests.
This assertiveness is emblematic of Putin's proclivity for military adventures abroad – from Georgia (2008), to Ukraine (2014), to Syria – as a means to reassert Russia's international standing and to consolidate his rule by diverting public attention from the country's domestic problems. The 2014 annexation of Crimea, for example, enabled him to rally the nation behind him in the face of tightening economic sanctions; the Syrian intervention has had a similar effect.
As the economy worsens still further, the Kremlin suppresses dissent and whips up ultra-nationalist sentiment by glorifying the likes of Ivan the Terrible and Stalin. This in turn makes Russia into an unstable and unpredictable one-man rule without eliminating Putin's need to generate recurring crises to continue diverting the restive population from the country's domestic problems.
In order to contain Moscow, which is likely to test the Trump administration by exploiting the divergences between Washington and its European allies, the West needs a long-term, unified strategy that will place future talks with Russia within an unambiguous and comprehensive framework. It can demonstrate its support for its Middle Eastern allies by tightening the sanctions against the Russian military-industrial complex; making Moscow accountable for its Syrian war crimes; and credibly threatening a limited use of force against the Assad regime for any future ceasefire violations.
Ultimately, the Russian options are limited and contingent on what the West will or will not do. The devastating consequences of taking Putin at his word in Syria for a year now has blinded the West to his hostile intent. Western success will therefore depend on drawing a firm and decisive line in the sand that Moscow will not dare to cross.
Norman A. Bailey
Asia Times, Nov. 17, 2016
With the world’s attention fixed on the astonishing victory of Donald Trump in the American presidential election, grossly insufficient attention is being paid to another and potentially very dangerous development. Trump may end up being a disaster of continental proportions or he may be just what the doctor ordered for a country that has been drowning in debt and political correctness…But halfway around the world a crafty master of negotiation, propaganda, subversion, and military display is making huge strides towards the achievement of his immediate and long-term goals.
Vladimir Putin is playing a difficult hand masterfully. The Russian economy is weak and getting worse as the market for its principal mainstays, oil and gas, is increasingly unstable. This explains why the preceding list of the elements of statecraft used by Putin does not include economic strategies. Despite this and a serious demographic meltdown, Russia is expanding its power and influence in every direction.
It is obvious why a great connoisseur of negotiating skills such as Trump finds Putin a fellow spirit. The Russian armed forces are engaged in a massive display of military might, up to and including engaging in ongoing hostilities in Syria, where naval and air bases have been acquired and ships and aircraft deployed, now including its single aircraft carrier. In a very short time Russia has become a recognized player in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East.
Turkey has been humbled and has sued for peace. Chalk up another Putin victory. Moldova and Bulgaria are now governed by pro-Russian regimes and no-one will be surprised if Moldova now merges with the Russian enclave Transnistria and then applies for reincorporation into the Russian empire. Whether that happens or not Ukraine is now threatened on both its western and eastern flanks.
The dismemberment of Georgia and Ukraine have become accepted facts subject only to occasional toothless denunciations from the West. That stalwart of post-Soviet progress on both the political and economic fronts, Estonia, is now suddenly politically unstable. Former Soviet satellites Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic are now governed by anti-Western regimes as well. While all that is going on, Russian ships and planes incessantly violate the waters and airspace of neighboring (as well as some non-neighboring) countries. Again, reaction has been feeble.
Despite its economic weakness, Russia has been able to devote sufficient resources to its armed forces so that they can deploy state-of-the-art equipment (at a time when Western defense establishments are starved of resources) and of course a massive nuclear arsenal inherited from the Soviet Union.
There is nothing backward about Russian science and technology, as demonstrated by constant hacking of an assortment of Western targets, both governmental and non-governmental. Blatant interference in the recent US election has elicited not much more than a tepid response and of course Edward Snowden is still plying his trade in Moscow.
The significance of all this activity resides in the confluence of economic weakness and demographic decline coupled with brilliant statecraft and military might. Having to depend on the pride of the Russian people in their enhanced international standing for his popularity may well lead Putin to engage in ever-increasing levels of challenge to the West. Any number of circumstances could set off a military confrontation, escalating to open warfare and even the use of nuclear weapons.
A friend in the White House is not necessarily a bad thing under these circumstances. Putin may feel that escalating conflicts might jeopardize his relations with Trump. We must hope so, because the alternative—a Russia hurtling towards armed confrontation with the West, is a prospect that should thoroughly frighten us all.
‘WINTER IS COMING,’ BY GARRY KASPAROV
Serge Schmemann
New York Times, Nov. 2, 2016
Russians in positions of power tend to measure their country’s standing in the world against the United States, longing to be recognized as equally important and powerful and getting very angry when they’re not so treated. President Vladimir Putin has made victimhood at America’s hands a leitmotif of his reign, and many Russians have bought into his claim that Washington tirelessly seeks ways to weaken, impoverish and otherwise humiliate their country. Many critics of Putin, in Russia and in the West, similarly hold that Washington’s treatment of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union was disdainful and thus undermined embryonic moves toward democracy, contributing to the rise of Putinism.
Garry Kasparov, the great Russian chess grandmaster who has become a fierce Putin opponent, offers a mirror image of this theme. In his view, espoused in many articles and now in “Winter Is Coming,” the West — more specifically, the United States, and even more specifically the Democratic Party under President Obama — is guilty of chronic appeasement and weakness in letting bad guys like Putin stay in power.
I should say up front that I cannot agree that the United States somehow deliberately sought to humiliate Russia in those chaotic days in the 1990s when Communist rule collapsed, or somehow failed to support the first tentative democratic reforms. To argue that the United States had the prescience and power to understand and direct events in Russia overlooks the enormous complexity in the disintegration of a vast, nuclear-armed, totalitarian empire. From the time Mikhail Gorbachev first loosened Soviet control until the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991, events moved in ways nobody in the East or West could predict or fully grasp, and it is to Russia’s and America’s credit that so little blood was shed in that momentous transition.
Kasparov sees things differently. To him, what hope there was for Russia after the Berlin Wall came down soon turned into a steady march toward authoritarian rule under a former K.G.B. agent, aided and abetted by a feckless West. Half the book is about the evolution of Putin from Boris Yeltsin’s handpicked successor to the capo di tutti capi of a mafia state. There is not much new here, and most readers will not need to be convinced that Putin is a bad guy.
The other and more important theme of the book is the reputed absence of a moral component in Western foreign affairs, which has “encouraged autocrats like Putin and terrorist groups like ISIS to flourish around the world.” Kasparov’s message is aimed at an American audience. Written in English (with the chess writer Mig Greengard), and with a title borrowed from “Game of Thrones,” “Winter Is Coming” is meant as a warning of impending doom should the West persist with the “moral capitulation” that Kasparov repeatedly decries.
There’s no pretense of nonpartisanship here, no subtlety. A fiery man known for his dynamic play in chess and for his self-assurance, Kasparov fully credits Ronald Reagan for the end of the Cold War and the fall of the “evil empire” — “Lesser problems were left to lesser men” — and he has no doubt that “the world would be a safer, more democratic place today had John McCain been elected” president, or at least Mitt Romney, who called Russia “without question our No. 1 geopolitical foe.” Barack Obama, by contrast, is relentlessly and repeatedly skewered: The president is “reluctant to confront the enemies of democracy to defend the values he touts so convincingly”; he is “busy retreating on every front”; and even when he does seem to be standing up to Putin, the most Kasparov can allow is, “I suppose that doing the right thing for the wrong reason is better than never doing it at all.”
The politicking becomes somewhat tedious, as do the “I told you so” moments scattered through the book: “It is cold comfort to be told, ‘You were right!’ ” Kasparov laments in his introduction. But much as one may disagree with Kasparov’s analyses, the main problem here is not so much with his accusations of Western or American perfidy. He has his right to his opinions, and even to the aggressive tone in which they are served up. That’s who he is. I covered Kasparov’s ascent to the world chess championship against the grandmaster openly preferred by the Kremlin, Anatoly Karpov, in matches that became a memorable ideological contest between the audacious upstart and the dull company man. In 2005, Kasparov retired from professional chess and dedicated himself “to push back against the rising tide of repression coming from the Kremlin,” and he was admirably active in the anti-Putin marches until a relentless crackdown curtailed open opposition. Kasparov now lives in self-imposed exile — temporary, he insists — in New York.
The real problem with “Winter Is Coming” is with its presumption that the United States is somehow responsible for what Russia has become, or for what it should become. Certainly Washington has an obligation to challenge Moscow and Putin when international norms or human rights are violated. Indeed, Obama and America’s democratic allies have done just that with the progressively tougher sanctions they have ordered against Russia. But even Reagan, the president Kasparov so adulates, never sought regime change in the “evil empire,” instead looking for areas of cooperation with Gorbachev. And ultimately it was Gorbachev, more than any American or other Western leader, who played the greatest role in bringing down the Soviet system.
Yet Kasparov, born and raised in the Soviet Union and intimately aware that Communism was overthrown first and foremost by Russians themselves, acknowledges their responsibility for Putin’s rule only in one throwaway line — “In the end, Putin is a Russian problem, of course, and Russians must deal with how to remove him.’’ The next sentence is: “He and his repressive regime, however, are supported directly and indirectly by the free world.” What the free world should be doing, he argues, includes adopting a “global Magna Carta” uniting all democracies in the fight against dictators, arming Ukraine, developing substitutes for the energy Europe imports from Russia and heeding Kasparov. Over the years, he laments, he has provided long lists of ways to counter Putin, but “even now, after he has proven my worst fears correct and everyone is telling me how right I was, few of those recommendations have been enacted.”
This is not the place to argue the merits or feasibility of arming Ukraine or cutting Russian gas imports. Nor is there a need to defend President Obama against Kasparov’s crude and baseless insults. The question to be posed is whether even the most aggressive Western stance toward Putin would make him less dictatorial or Russia more free. That change must come from within, and I would have much preferred to hear Kasparov’s take on what must change in Russia and how the Russians might do it. There are plenty of other people to trash Barack Obama.
Israeli Official: Russia Has Long-Term Ambitions in the Middle East: Jerusalem Post, Nov. 16, 2016—Israel should be concerned about the deepening disconnect between Russia's aims in the Middle East and its own goals, according to a senior Israeli official who held high-level meetings in Moscow last week.
Is Russia More Dangerous than ISIS?: Michael Rubin, Commentary, Nov. 21, 2016—As President-elect Donald Trump begins to fill his top administration spots, his selection of retired General Michael Flynn suggests that Trump’s campaign trail flirtations were not empty rhetoric and he intends to move forward with a partnership with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Tip of the Iceberg: Russian Use of Power in Syria: Maj. Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror, BESA, Oct. 9, 2016—Russia's status in the Middle East has changed remarkably in recent years. Some go so far as to argue, with some justification, that it has become the most powerful superpower in the region, or at least within the context of the Syrian conflict. The main reason for this has been Russian President Vladimir Putin's ability to invest significant resources in the region, coupled with his willingness to take significant risk.
A Trump-Putin Axis?: Neville Teller, Jerusalem Post, Nov. 24, 2016— US President-elect Donald Trump admires Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. That much became clear during Trump’s presidential campaign, as did his intention when in office to repair the US’s damaged relations with the Russian Federation. At the moment the US and Russia, although both nominally combating Islamic State (IS) in the Syrian civil war, are so far from allies that they are very nearly belligerents.
