


#POTUS POTUS #DOJ DOJ #FBI FBI #CIA CIA #DIA DIA #ODNI ODNI #News #Times #NewsAndTimes #NT #TNT Putin Russia #Putin #Russia #GRU GRU #Israel Israel #World World #USA USA
Putin’s War: Ukraine and Gaza fronts – GS https://t.co/2PvsLSMzDM
Links – The News And Times -… pic.twitter.com/eZH0OYf4cf— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) November 9, 2023
Putin’s War: Ukraine and Gaza fronts – GS https://t.co/2PvsLSMzDM
–https://t.co/Np6PIVs0Ht— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) November 9, 2023
🇷🇺 _||~ 🇰🇿 ENERGY + DEEPLOMACY 😜 Russian President V. #Putin is on an official visit to #Kazakhstan to meet with his Kazakh counterpart. #Centralasia #Energy pic.twitter.com/UI6ECVvBVq https://t.co/NnK4DutefM
— A Deniz Ekşioğlu (@_AD_CHANEL6) November 9, 2023
Agree: “The war has become a ‘wand of salvation’ for Putin. This is the old cure for any revolution. And he got hooked on this method like a drug.” Good 🧵 on why Putin don’t want pease. https://t.co/KETiox8pPX
— Kaspar Quistgaard 🇩🇰 (@KasparQ) November 9, 2023
#POTUS POTUS #DOJ DOJ #FBI FBI #CIA CIA #DIA DIA #ODNI ODNI #News #Times #NewsAndTimes #NT #TNT Putin Russia #Putin #Russia #GRU GRU #Israel Israel #World World #USA USA
– https://t.co/lU7chtEsJd
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Links – The News And Times – https://t.co/2HGdNir81K | Audio Posts – Saved…— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) November 9, 2023
Putin’s Gaza front

On 13 October in Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek, Putin claimed that ‘no one suspects [Russia] wishes to play around’ with the Gaza conflict because of its strong and good relations with each of the protagonists. But the historical record belies this assurance. Even in Soviet times, when Moscow took the ideological offensive against ‘US imperialism’ and ‘Israeli aggression’, it sought to create synergies between the region’s endemic contradictions and hostilities. Under Putin’s watch, it has cooperated ‘pragmatically’ with every country and its worst enemy. It has ‘played around’ with pre-meditation and purpose, deepening relations with Iran, Saudi Arabia, Hamas and Israel simultaneously.
In itself, the Putin-Netanyahu relationship emerged from a balance of fears no less than a balance of forces, to which one must add the respect of each party for the tenacity and calculated ruthlessness of the other. But it also was a product of permissive circumstances: President Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’ and the diminution of America’s presence and influence in the Middle East.
Over a good fifteen years, the relationship brought tangible benefits to both sides. On the one hand, Russia looked the other way whilst Israel struck targets inside Lebanon and Syria. In turn, Israel refused to join the Western sanctions regimes of 2014 and 2022 against Russia, and despite US entreaties, has not supplied air defence systems or other lethal weapons to Ukraine either, at least overtly. In 2011, Putin went so far as to describe Israel as ‘a special state to us…practically a Russian-speaking country’, and only seven years ago, he called it an ‘unconditional ally against international terrorism’. Yet Putin offered no condolences to Netanyahu after Hamas’s attack.
To understand why, one needs to appreciate just how radically the Ukraine war has restructured Russia’s priorities. Prior to February 2022, the 50-year special relationship with Germany was at least as important as the Russia-Israel relationship, but it was sacrificed on the altar of Russia’s ‘special military operation’. Russia has now made the same calculation with respect to Israel.
Five interests now take precedence: the rupturing of the West, the war in Ukraine, ties with Iran (which the war has made an indispensable ally of Russia), sabotaging the US-sponsored Saudi-Israel entente, and driving as many wedges as possible between the ‘collective West’ and the ‘global South’. In short, the specific conditions that spawned the Russia-Israel relationship fifteen years ago have given way to new ones.
These new conditions are at least as advantageous to Russia as the old. Today, we need to face four unpalatable truths.
First, Russia views Israel as the Achilles heel of the United States. Washington might claim that it will support Ukraine ‘as long as it takes’, but it knows that Israel cannot be allowed to fail. If Congress is forced to debate the relative priority of Ukraine and Israel, there is no debate. Israel wins.
Second, Israel’s greatest weakness is that it is predictable. History has taught its people that turning the other cheek is a recipe for extinction. The attack of 7 October was not merely, in the words of Israel’s ambassador to Germany, ‘the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust’, it was a stunning exercise in ‘reflexive control’: the defeat of an adversary by its own actions. Israel’s survival is more at risk today than at any time since 1948.
Third, the fates of Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan are intertwined. What links them is the commitment and credibility of the United States. The Kremlin believes that their removal from the political map would mean the end of the West as such. Possibly, it is right.
Fourth, whether or not Russia was complicit in Hamas’s attack, it had every reason to be. Its 17-year relationship with Hamas goes well beyond courtesy calls. The visits of the Hamas leadership and the head of its Politburo to Moscow in March and September this year were almost certainly about consultation rather than courtesy. If, as ‘informed sources’ claim, Hamas and Iran began planning the operation one year ago, it is most unlikely that Russia was kept in the dark.
Françoise Thom recently wrote: ‘Putin understands nothing about Western civilization. On the other hand, he has an unerring instinct for what can destroy it’. Maybe.
Over the years, Putin has proved himself to be less a master strategist than an engineer of lose-lose outcomes. He might come to regret some of these. US military power is now returning to the Middle East in earnest. It takes little effort to grasp that an Israel-Iran, not to say US-Iran war could bring a swift halt to Iran’s lifeline of military supplies to Russia. Moreover, it would swiftly expose Russia’s limitations. In such a war, Russia would have no spare military power to offer. Instead of making Russia indispensable, it might show the world that it has no clothes. In the end, Russia might pay a horrendous price for the harm it has wrought. But the end could be far away. Meanwhile, Russia’s capacity to confound, subvert and damage is likely to remain unrivalled.
This article is a revised version of the one published in Postimees on 26 October.
Israeli forces battle Hamas fighters in Gaza City.
IDF extended for an extra hour Wednesday its evacuation corridor for Palestinians to leave northern Gaza, as U.N. says 50,000 flee south.
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says the death toll from Israeli attacks has surpassed 10,500.
G7 backs Israel’s right to self-defense, while calling for pauses in fighting to allow humanitarian aid to reach Palestinian civilians.
Israeli forces battled Hamas militants Thursday in Gaza City as Palestinian civilians flee the area that is the focus of Israeli military operations following a deadly attack by Hamas last month.
In addition to the ground fighting in the largest city in the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces have also been hitting the area with airstrikes.
The fighting has prompted massive displacement, with the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs saying 50,000 people fled Wednesday for the southern part of the Gaza Strip.
That figure was by far the highest this week. The U.N. said a total of 72,000 people had evacuated northern Gaza since Sunday.
Israel began opening an evacuation corridor Sunday along the main road connecting the north and south of Gaza. It remains open for four hours daily to allow civilians to leave the epicenter of fighting. The IDF said Wednesday it extended the corridor for an additional hour because so many people were using it.
The U.N. and other aid groups are providing them with water and high energy biscuits just south of the line separating north and south.
Conditions have been growing more dire in the north, which has been out of reach of aid deliveries for the past week. The U.N. said that as of Tuesday, no bakeries were operating there because of a lack of fuel, water, wheat flour and damage to their premises.
Israel launched its offensive in response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attack in southern Israel that killed more than 1,400 people, mostly civilians. Hamas also took about 240 people hostage. The U.S., U.K., EU and other countries in the West have designated Hamas a terrorist organization.
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says Israeli attacks have killed more than 10,500 people, two-thirds of them women and children. There is no way to independently verify those numbers, though the U.N. says the ministry’s numbers have been reliable in the past.
Dire conditions
The U.N. has warned of overcrowding in southern Gaza with shelters “unable to accommodate new arrivals.” About two-thirds of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are displaced, according to the U.N. At one shelter in Khan Younis housing 22,000 displaced Palestinians, the U.N. says at least 600 people are sharing a single toilet.
The World Health Organization said Wednesday that the risk is growing in Gaza for the rapid spread of infectious diseases, as bodies decompose under building rubble and health, water and sanitation systems have been severely disrupted. Cases of diarrhea in small children have skyrocketed, scabies, lice, skin and upper respiratory infections also have been on the rise.
The WHO and the U.N. agency that assists Palestinians, UNRWA, said Wednesday they facilitated the delivery of emergency medical supplies to al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, despite “huge risks to our staff and health partners” because of the bombing. It is only the second delivery of supplies to the hospital since the war began, and the agencies said it is insufficient to meet the immense need. Israel accuses Hamas of concealing its command center under al-Shifa.
The U.N. said the Rafah border crossing with Egypt was not open Wednesday, a day after 600 foreign and dual nationals were able to leave Gaza.
U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Volker Türk was at the Rafah crossing Wednesday, which he called “the gates to a living nightmare.”
“The collective punishment by Israel of Palestinian civilians amounts also to a war crime, as does the unlawful forcible evacuation of civilians,” he said. “The massive bombardments by Israel have killed, maimed and injured in particular women and children.”
He also condemned as atrocities the actions of Hamas on Oct. 7, saying their terror attack and the holding of hostages are also war crimes.
“We have fallen off a precipice. This cannot continue,” he said, appealing for a humanitarian cease-fire.
VOA U.N. Correspondent Margaret Besheer contributed reporting for this report. Some information for this article was provided by The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
