2023-10-22 00:21:44
Russia, with the permission of the arms merchants, may benefit the most from the violent outbreak in the Middle East. Since Hamas launched the terrorist attack against southern Israel and the Israeli Armed Forces began to respond by bombing the Gaza Strip, Moscow is rubbing its hands.
Russian diplomacy even changed its traditional policy of balancing Israelis and Palestinians to take the side of the Palestinians. Russian President Vladimir Putin has still not spoken of “terrorism” despite the fact that Hamas killed 19 Russian citizens in its attack, among the almost 1,500 dead in total. The head of the Kremlin even compared Gaza to the siege of Leningrad carried out by the Nazis in World War II.
The Russian media, at the behest of the Kremlin, have been clearly on the Palestinian side for two weeks. Israel, explains a European diplomat, does not protest because it understands that Moscow can be useful to it due to its influence over Iran and Syria.
Ukraine, for its part, sides with Israel and tries to make the world see Hamas’ attacks as equivalent to Russia’s attacks on Ukraine. Although Tel-Aviv rejected a visit from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Jewish and whose grandparents fought against the Nazis in the ranks of the Soviet Red Army, as if he still didn’t want to bother Moscow.
The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, fears losing some of the support of the West. Photo: REUTERS
How Moscow would benefit
The last few days show at least three great effects of war that benefit the Kremlin in its war of conquest in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian president reacted to the Hamas attack by flying to Brussels to attend a meeting of defense ministers of the 31 NATO member states. Zelensky fears, although all voices in Brussels reassured him, that the United States will not be able to continue supplying weapons at the same level to Ukraine if it also has to supply them to Israel.
American diplomacy has already told him not to worry, but Zelensky knows that the United States and European governments already had problems supplying artillery ammunition at the rate Ukraine needs.
Israel also uses the same fighter jets that Ukraine wants the Americans and Europeans to give it, the F-16s. Although Israel also has the new F35s, kyiv fears that there will not be enough for everyone in European and American arsenals.
The second great effect is more political, but it can have deeper long-term consequences. European governments, more than the American one, have been trying for months to convince Asian, African and Latin American countries of their vision of the conflict in Ukraine.
Bags with bodies after an attack in the town of Hroza, in the Kupiansk region, Ukraine, days ago. Photo: EFE
Since the conflict broke out, Europe has defended that Russia is involved in a war of aggression, the first between European states since the Second World War. And he condemns all Russian war crimes one after another.
Europe has imposed the toughest sanctions in its history against Russia despite paying for an energy crisis and an inflationary rebound. He has severed virtually all economic relations with a major trading partner and has gone so far as to create a task force to investigate war crimes by Russian troops in Ukraine. The Europeans are emptying their arsenals to arm the Ukrainians.
That vision and those decisions, which much of the rest of the world does not share, are supported by a discourse of respect for human rights, International Law and Humanitarian Law and the Charter of the United Nations. It is legally and ethically exquisite.
The problem comes when Israel appears in the spotlight, with its occupation of a good part of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Palestinian territories according to United Nations resolutions. And above all, with the indiscriminate bombings about Gaza.
Europe now assures that Israel has the right to defend itself but that it must respect, in doing so, International Law and not attack civilians or, for example, leave them without water, food or energy. Israel does not listen to the Europeans and nothing happens, Europe does not react as it did with Russia, it does not impose sanctions, it does not raise its voice.
Some of its leaders, such as the president of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, are not even able to visit Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, when they fly to Israel and meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. From Brussels, many diplomats are shocked that the US Secretary of State is overtaking the European Commission on the path of respect for International Law.
Criticism of European “hypocrisy”
This “hypocrisy”, as denounced by a part of the European Parliament, is being tried to counteract by the European ‘chancellor’, the Spanish-Argentine Josep Borrell, who this week, in the European Parliament, said that the European Union has to be able to condemn and cry. the deaths of Israeli children and Palestinian children alike.
And this “hypocrisy” allows Moscow to maintain a discourse in which it denounces Europeans, who would demand respect for International Law as it suits them, not out of conviction but out of interest.
A third effect, less visible but also important, is that Ukraine is leaving the pages of newspapers and screens of European televisions. Information is continuously published and broadcast about the last hour of what is happening in Gaza, in some cases the situation in the Gaza sky is even broadcast live on the newspapers’ Internet pages, but it is happening more and more. less space to Ukraine.
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