JRL NEWSWATCH: “What is Russia’s role in the Israel-Gaza crisis?” – Fiona Hill, Kevin Huggard
“Is the Israel-Hamas war a distraction from Ukraine?”
“… FIONA HILL: There’s a lot of concern … that there will be less emphasis on Ukraine [and not just for the United States] …. European countries … are being roiled by … Gaza …. described recently by [a] foreign minister … as a ‘black hole … sucking everything else into it’ … causing immense domestic turmoil in every country [and] wider reverberations of conflict …. It’s also had effects on questions of whether we should be paying all this attention to Ukraine. … [T]he war in Ukraine has massive global effects … the equivalent of the great European land wars …. You could argue that Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel is like a Pearl Harbor event, opening up a whole new front in … a global set of conflicts … entangled and intertwined. … Russia and Iran are involved in both conflicts. North Korea … is …. supporting Russia in Ukraine; so is China, which also has equities in the Middle East.
… I think there will be more pressure [in] 2024[] to try to find some quick resolution to Ukraine so that … the Middle East can be focused on … disastrous because Ukraine is the largest country in Europe after Russia … recognized for 30 years as an independent state … [I]f Ukraine is partitioned, the chances of it being re-unified … are slim. … [P]artitioning Ukraine will set a precedent for a major power (in this case, Russia) having its way through force. Especially since Russia is a nuclear power and Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in return for some form of guarantee of its territorial integrity, this is going to have so many knock-on effects — including encouraging other countries to acquire nuclear weapons; emboldening Iran and North Korea, who have supported Russia; and highlighting the weaknesses of the United States and Europe. …
… There’s already the framing in the region and in … the Global South … that [Gaza] is a European imperial conflict between Israel and Hamas. Putin’s playing right into that. … Russia itself is an empire. Ukrainians … have been trying to … talk about being colonized and trying to push off the colonizer …. But most of the rest of the world doesn’t see Russia as an empire … a point that’s worth inspecting further. Some of this ties back to the … Soviet Union … champion[ing] … national liberation movements ….
… Putin is riding a wave … created by the external framing of the war in Gaza as a post-colonial conflict, and he’s whipping it up. All of the ways that the United States is seen to blame, and that Israel is seen to blame—Putin is just fanning those flames. He’s not trying to calm the situation in any way …. He’s trying to see what he can get out of it.
It’s a diversion from the past — from what Russia did in Chechnya — and it’s a diversion from what Russia’s doing now in Ukraine. It’s a diversion from the fact that Russia is cozying up to Iran. And it’s another way of finding an entry point into the Middle East to make sure that Russia has a role in ‘peacemaking’ …. Putin always wants to be where the action is ….”