Kyiv, Ukraine – When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, the world’s attention shifted from the Russian-Ukrainian war to the Middle East conflict.
As the new war erupted, Ukrainian officials and some observers rushed to accuse Moscow of interference and even more serious allegations — that it was supplying weapons to the Palestinian group.
They provided no evidence for their claims.
“Russia has an interest in starting a war in the Middle East, so that a new source of pain and suffering can undermine world unity, increase discord and contradictions and thus help Russia destroy freedom in Europe” , Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said at the time. .
“We see the Russian propagandists gloating. We see Moscow’s Iranian friends openly supporting those who attacked Israel. And all of this poses a much greater threat than the world currently perceives. Past world wars began with local aggression.”
Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s top intelligence official, claimed that Moscow could have supplied Hamas with weapons seized in Ukraine, which would appear to be an ideal way to cover up Russia’s fingerprints.
“We all clearly see that trophy weapons from Ukraine have indeed been transferred to the Hamas group. These are mainly infantry weapons,” he told the Ukrainska Pravda newspaper on October 12.
But several experts have warned that despite a decades-long friendship between Russia, Hamas and Iran, there is no concrete evidence of Russia supplying weapons.
“We fail to see the main thing – a statement by the Israeli army and its demonstration of the Hamas weapons it seized,” Nikolay Mitrokhin of Germany’s University of Bremen told Al Jazeera.
“So far, there is no evidence of a significant delivery of weapons from Russia to Gaza,” he said. “They could most likely emerge after (Israel finishes) the cleansing of Gaza, but only then will it make sense to talk about it.”
On November 2, Aleksander Venediktov of the Russian Security Council told the Ria Novosti news agency: “Such speculations are an open provocation.”
After the Hamas attacks, Israel launched a relentless bombing campaign on Gaza, with the stated aim of crushing the Palestinian group that rules the densely populated enclave.
More than 1,200 people have been killed in Israel – including more than a dozen Russian nationals – and more than 200 have been captured in Hamas attacks. The Israeli offensive in Gaza has killed more than 11,200 Palestinians.
Vera Mironova, a Russian-American security expert and author, renewed her weapons allegations, telling Al Jazeera that a former senior US security official was set to release a detailed report on the alleged link between the Hamas attack and Russia.
“This was fully coordinated with Moscow,” said Mironova, currently a researcher at Harvard University.
Russian President Vladimir Putin “didn’t say things like ‘attack (Israel),’ but it was 100 percent coordinated,” she said.
Mironova again claimed that Russia had supplied weapons to Hamas – and had done so via Iran and Syria to “distance itself” from the conflict.
“Russia has enough weapons to fuel” its war effort in Ukraine and its Middle Eastern allies, she said.
In exchange, she added, Iran is providing Russia with cheaper kamikaze drones so that their swarms can be launched to wreak havoc and overwhelm Western-supplied air defense systems, such as the MIM- 104 Patriot of American manufacture or the NASAMS of Norwegian manufacture.
Al Jazeera was unable to independently verify Mironova’s allegations.
Undocumented allegations of arms shipments cut both ways.
Last month, former Russian President and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev suggested that NATO weapons sent to Ukraine were “ending up” in the hands of Hamas fighters.
“So, NATO friends, game over? Weapons supplied to the Nazi regime in Ukraine are actively used in Israel,” Medvedev, currently deputy head of the Russian Security Council, wrote on Telegram on October 9.
“It’s only going to get worse.” Expect missiles, tanks and soon planes from kyiv on the black market,” he wrote.
According to Igar Tyshkevich, a foreign policy expert at the Kiev-based Ukrainian Institute of the Future, Russia could have shipped seized Western weapons to Ukraine, but possible sources of these weapons could have been Afghanistan, where huge quantities of Western equipment were left. after “the hasty withdrawal of the Americans” in 2021.
Another possible source is Iraq, where Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) sided with pro-US Iraqi forces to fight ISIS in 2014, he told Al Jazeera. Syria could have been a source of additional weapons, given the past presence of U.S. troops and President Bashar al-Assad’s political proximity to Iran, he said.
Hamas, for its part, has not commented on the continuing allegations regarding its supplies.
On October 26, Russia hosted Hamas leaders, a defiant move against the West likely aimed at demonstrating its diplomatic influence.
Israel called the Moscow meeting “reprehensible.”
A few days earlier, Hamas thanked Putin for his diplomatic support. The Russian leader took days to condemn the Hamas attack and, in his first comments on the crisis, blamed “the failure of US policy in the Middle East.”
“(We) appreciate Russian President Vladimir Putin’s position regarding the ongoing Zionist aggression against our people and his rejection of the siege of Gaza, the suppression of relief supplies and the targeting of civilians safe there,” he said. Hamas said in an October 15 statement.
Russia’s relations with Palestine and Israel
Russia’s current ties with Israel and Hamas predate decades of Soviet relations.
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin welcomed the creation of Israel in 1948, hoping it would become a pro-Moscow socialist nation.
But after Israel aligned itself with the West, the Soviets began building ties with Palestinian leaders – and trained hundreds of fighters in KGB schools.
Thousands of other Palestinians studied at universities across the USSR, from Tallinn to Tashkent – and one of them was Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
He wrote a doctoral thesis entitled “Hidden face: a link between Zionism and Nazism” in Moscow in 1982 under the supervision of Yevgeny Primakov, Arabist and then director of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Primakov, a spy, would become foreign minister of post-Soviet Russia, then prime minister in the 1990s.
In 1967, the Kremlin labeled Israel a “Zionist warmonger” and severed diplomatic relations over the Arab-Israeli War.
But after millions of post-Soviet Jews settled in Israel, Israel began to form closer ties with Moscow.
According to Chatham House experts Nikolay Kozhanov and James Nixey, it is “likely that the war between Hamas and Israel means the end of Russia’s decades-long policy of balancing between different actors in the Middle East.”
In a recent article, they wrote that given Russia’s hosting of a Hamas delegation in Moscow in October, its refusal to condemn the initial Hamas attack, and its close alliance with Iran, “Tel Aviv no longer considers Russia an ally and would likely reject it.” as a mediator. »
