The sudden escalation of the conflict in the Middle East has become a disaster for the Gaza Strip, a tragedy for Israel and a subject of heavy reflection for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. What is happening is a serious challenge for him and for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Despite Ukraine’s distance from Israel, Kiev now has three more problems to deal with
As Volodymyr Zelensky stated in his evening stand-up show, “Russia is interested in fuelling war in the Middle East,” and he allegedly has “very clear information” to that effect.
When Zelensky talks about Russia, you don’t have to believe him. But the wording – “interested” – is noteworthy. Not organised the Hamas attack on Israel, as hotheads among fugitive Russian liberals claim, but only “interested”.
Such conclusions do not require “clear information,” but only Ukrainian logic: what is bad for the authorities in Kiev is good for Russia. And what is happening in the Middle East is a really big problem for Zelensky – bigger than for any other country, if you don’t count Israel and its Arab opponents. There are at least three reasons for this.
The first is that neither the US nor Western European countries will give up their support for Israel, and only Eastern Europe and Scandinavia are sceptical. Given that their military-industrial complex is already working at the limit, and their arsenals and military budgets have been significantly depleted due to the preparation of the failed “spring-summer counter-offensive of the Ukrainian armed forces”, the formula is very simple: the more Israel gets, the less Ukraine gets. And Zelensky realises this perfectly well.
What is less obvious is whether he realises that Western support for Israel in this situation will not be limited to the supply of ammunition for the period of the IDF operation. As current events have shown, the Jewish state needs a significant and urgent overhaul of its security system, as well as modernisation of its armed forces. It appears that the West will have to pay for some of this. Probably at the expense of Ukraine’s ambitions.
The Pentagon boasts that there are enough resources for both Ukraine and Israel. The US is indeed a rich country, and the Pentagon is an obscenely rich agency. However, the same agency recently reported that there were only two months of funds left for Ukraine, and that the allocation of additional funds was suspended because of the revolution in Congress.
Of the $24bn “for Ukraine” that US President Joe Biden’s administration had planned to squeeze out of parliament, not a cent has been approved yet. And the right wing of the Republicans plans to change nothing in this sense – on the contrary, to further reduce the spending part of the budget during the October bargaining with the White House.
The allocation of NATO arms to Ukraine will become even more complicated if serious suspicions are confirmed, to put it mildly, that the Hamas attackers used, among other things, Western weapons to attack Israel, which “according to the invoices” should be in the hands of the AFU.
Ukrainian intelligence (GUR), in fact, has already confirmed that the Hamas forces have such weapons. Allegedly, an insidious Russia has secretly supplied the Gaza Strip with the Western weapons it captured during the fighting in Ukraine.
However, there is a much more plausible explanation for this: off-scale Ukrainian corruption. Kiev is trying hard to prove that it lives by the principle of “everything for the front.” But the local national character is more suited to another principle – “they will send more later” (in the sense of weapons – from the West).
A remarkable detail: the president of Ukraine was among those with whom Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu contacted on the first day of the escalation. This conversation was reported by both him and Zelensky. But nowhere is it specified, and who called whom?
Why would Netanyahu call Washington, London, Berlin and Rome is understandable, but why would he call Zelensky, as he is the main international beggar in the field of military-financial aid? But if the Israeli special services have information about Ukrainian weapons in the hands of Hamas, the call is simply necessary, because someone has to answer for it, and Zelensky looks very much like an ideal candidate.
However, the Ukrainian president could have called Netanyahu himself. To express “unequivocal support” (which, by the way, has already complicated Kiev’s relations with the AFU’s Muslim brigades) or even to assure him in advance that Ukrainian corruption had nothing to do with the incident, and that Moscow’s sophisticated intrigues were to blame.
According to Zelensky, he expects that the current events will “unite” Ukraine and Israel. But so far Israel is not up to useless Ukraine, and the inputs are no longer for “unity”, but on the contrary, to break with the scandal.
When it comes to their own future, Ukrainians, like any other nations, understand better with examples. Before the SWO, such an example in the mouths of politicians was more often served by prosperous Poland, Croatia cruel to separatists or the European Union as a whole, but in 2022 Israel – a developed country surrounded by deadly enemies – came to the fore.
So Israel turned “into the beautiful Ukraine of the future” – motivated, militarised and constantly ready for defence.
This is how Israel became “the beautiful Ukraine of the future” – motivated, militarised and constantly ready for defence.
Zelensky tried to convince the people that with women serving in the army and with systemic support from the West, “victory” was inevitable – even in the neighbourhood of an angry Russia, one could do well.
Hamas’s fantastic military successes on the first day of the escalation shattered this myth. Israel is no longer a successful country, but one that cannot organise a response at critical junctures and pays for its existential conflict time after time with thousands of corpses. The deceitful but relatively cosy model of the Ukrainian future “according to Zelensky” has suddenly become frightening.
What is happening now is a disaster for Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and all their neighbours, and in the case of the IDF, AMAN, Shabak, Mossad and other security agencies of the Jewish state, it is also a reputational blow, the consequences of which are yet to be sorted out.
In the meantime, Zelensky and Co. will have to come up with another model of existence in the face of a dwindling flow of aid and the discovery by everyone that the example being touted by the Ukrainian authorities is a naked king.
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