On March 15, the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov received senior Hizballah officials in Moscow; two days later, Lavrov’s Israeli counterpart, Gabi Ashkenazi, arrived in the same city for consultations. Shortly thereafter, Lavrov set off for the Persian Gulf, while Vladimir Putin flew to Turkey, where he attended the ribbon-cutting of a nuclear plant Russia built. Jonathan Spyer notes that in these meetings alone, the Kremlin shored up relations with all three of the Middle East’s rival blocs: the Iran-Syria-Hizballah axis, the Sunni Islamists led by Qatar and Turkey, and the pro-Western countries led by Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, and the UAE.
This approach contains a measure of sophistication, and has resulted in Moscow emerging as the go-to mediator on a variety of regional files which the United States has chosen, through weariness or other priorities, to [ignore]. When mediation is needed between Israel and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, Russia is the only relevant candidate, as has been demonstrated on two significant occasions recently.
In all these areas, Russian tactical pragmatism has proved an asset. In a manner quite unfamiliar to Western practices, but well in accordance with Middle Eastern realities, the Russians care little about final resolution of conflicts, and hardly at all about the mode of governance and the ideology of the elements with which they deal. They proceed on the basis of current shared interests, rather than longer-term partnerships. They are comfortable in the environment of frozen conflicts and divided countries, and have no sense of urgency in the need to rectify either of these situations.
In the fragmented spaces that characterize large parts of the post-2010 Arab world, this tactical flexibility can bring advantages. It enabled the Russians, for example, to support, ostensibly, the reconquest by their “ally” Assad of the entirety of Syria, while subsequently negotiating the current de-facto partition of the country in order to draw Turkey further from NATO and closer to the Russian orbit. It has enabled Moscow also, notably, to acquiesce to the near-weekly bombing raids by Israeli aircraft against targets belonging to Moscow’s supposed partner in Syria—Iran.
Russia’s regional approach has paid dividends largely because of the vacuum left by the partial U.S. disengagement from the Middle East.
Read more on Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security: https://jiss.org.il/en/spyer-russian-mideast-related-diplomatic-activity/