Over the weekend, an abortive rebellion by a segment of the Russian military apparatus seemed to expose Vladimir Putin’s weakness. Ukrainian forces, meanwhile, have pushed forward with what appear to be the preliminary operations of the awaited counteroffensive. With all this happening, Kiev’s embassy in Israel deemed yesterday an opportune time to lambaste the Jewish state for taking, in its view, insufficient steps to help Ukraine defend itself against the Russian onslaught. This undiplomatic complaint ignored not only the real limitations on Jerusalem’s options, but also the fact that, as Jonathan Spyer explains, Russia and Israel are, like it or not, aligned against one another:
There is today a de-facto Moscow-Tehran alliance. As such, a decisive defeat for Moscow in its Ukraine invasion will be a defeat for Iran too. The seismic shocks such a defeat might well set off in Russia would weaken Moscow’s capacity for offering support and assistance to its emergent Mideast partner.
[The outcome of the Ukraine war] matters to Israel because the maintenance of Western prestige and power is also an Israeli strategic interest. But, more concretely, it matters because Israel’s main regional enemy is a key element of the Russian war effort. New information released by the Biden administration in early June shows the extent of Iranian assistance to the Russian war effort in Ukraine. The administration has referred to Tehran in recent weeks as Russia’s “top military backer.”
All this is not a one-way street, of course. In return, Russia is set to supply Iran with Su-35 fighter jets, attack helicopters, and possibly—and most significantly—with the S-400 air-defense system. All these systems, once integrated, would enormously assist the Iranian capacity for defending its airspace.
This emergent partnership has non-military aspects too. In an agreement signed last month, Russia and Iran pledged to build a north-south transportation corridor, buttressing the maritime links across the Caspian through the construction of railway lines adjacent to it. Such a system would serve to strengthen the capacity to bypass Western sanctions. . . . An anti-Israel alliance will in the near future receive a hammer blow from Ukrainian fighters using Western weapons systems. It is in Israel’s interest that the hammer strikes home.
Read more on Jerusalem Post: https://www.jpost.com/international/article-746508