During Lord Cameron’s trip to Washington, he will once again insist that the safety of the West depends on funding Ukraine. It has been a bumper six months for Russia, thanks to Hamas.
While the United States has sent large volumes of arms and ammunition to Israel for its campaign against Gaza, Ukraine’s supplies have been strangled. American and British aircraft and other assets that had been supplying real-time battlefield intelligence to Kyiv have been moved to the Middle East.
The civilian death toll in Gaza now exceeds the innocent Ukrainian victims of Russia’s renewed assaults a little over two years ago. No matter how ghastly the recent images from Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv have been, following the deliberate targeting of civilians and rescuers in “double tap” attacks, the Kremlin knows all eyes are really on Israel’s bombardment of Palestinians on the Mediterranean.
Diplomatic and military energy has been refocused in Washington from Ukraine to the Middle East. Lord Cameron, now Foreign Secretary, is going to use all the weight of his past life as prime minister and Conservative leader to drive home to US Republicans that Russia is more dangerous today than when they were growing up during the Cold War.
An existential threat to Israel is seen in Washington as a higher priority than the existential threat to modern Ukraine.
This is bizarre. There is no scenario (aside from the moral) in which Israel trumps Ukraine when it comes to strategic importance to the West. Ukraine is a vast, wealthy, European country on the frontline with a Russian regime that’s morbidly jealous of its neighbour. Israel exists and has every right to continue to do so – but it is of no great strategic or economic value to the West. Not compared to Ukraine.
Washington is coy about how much new military aid has been sent to Israel, and not to Ukraine, since the Hamas horrors of 7 October last year.
But according to The Washington Post: “In December, the administration approved the sale of nearly 14,000 tank ammunition cartridges and equipment to Israel, worth $106.5m (£91m), and the sale of 155mm artillery shells and related equipment worth $147.5m (£126m). The White House bypassed congressional approval for both sales by invoking emergency authority.”
On the front lines in Ukraine earlier this year, every single soldier I spoke to pleaded for two things above all else: ammunition for tanks and artillery.
That ammunition is a small proportion of what the US has been sending to the conflict in Gaza. Among the many hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of hardware are precision-guided bombs, bunker-buster JDAMS, and other equipment that Ukraine has been denied by the West in the face of Russia’s invasion since 2014.
P8 Poseidon and Rivet Joint spy planes from the US and UK were moved to the Middle Eastern theatre of potential wider war soon after 7 October. This left Ukraine with less real-time intelligence than it had before Russia unleashed its latest offensive campaign.
Russian assaults have increased in Ukraine as the Israeli attacks on Gaza have continued. Russia is making gains on the battlefield because Ukraine doesn’t have enough weapons, ammunition, or intelligence to give this pro-Western democracy a chance to match Russia’s sheer mass of men and material.
Tehran, according to Reuters, is sending an additional 400 surface-to-surface Fateh missiles with ranges of 300-700km. So far, the West has refused to supply long-range weapons like this to Ukraine.
Could this have all been part of a wider Putin plan?
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has said that his country’s supplies of air defences are dwindling against the onslaught of Russia’s drone attacks. The low-tech drones that soak up Ukrainian air defences are the Iranian Shahed, which swarm the skies. Zelensky said that his country might lose the war if the US doesn’t come through with $60bn currently held up in Congress.
Iran and Russia are very close militarily and have an intelligence-sharing pact. Tehran is a major supplier of Shahed and Mohajer-6 drones which are used to bombard Ukraine almost daily. An Iranian drone factory is now being built in Russia to keep up the supply of munitions to kill Ukrainians.
When Vladimir Putin first travelled outside Russia after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he flew in July that year to Iran to meet with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader. Senior operators with Russia’s GRU (Military Intelligence) travel back and forth to Tehran. They were regular visitors before the 7 October atrocities were unleashed by Hamas, sources tell me.
Any student of the Middle East, including experts in the Kremlin, would have calculated that Hamas’ rampage on 7 October last year was certain to provoke a massive response from Israel. Equally certain was that Israel’s attacks on Gaza would escalate regional tensions – and lead to an increase in US military aid diverted from Ukraine to Israel. That suits Russia.
Russia’s allies in the Middle East, Iran and Syria’s murderous regime under Bashar al-Assad, are part of an axis of allies dedicated to the destruction of Israel, who hate America. Russia doesn’t support this ideology.
Pro-Russian Republicans, like Donald Trump, should remember, and Cameron will hint, that America’s enemies are useful idiots, if not friends, to Putin. His intelligence and military officers are on intimate terms with some of the most violent and dangerous groups in the Middle East.
Russia’s air force has bombarded Syrian civilians and hospitals on behalf of the government in Damascus for years. Hezbollah has had tens of thousands of Lebanese men fighting for Assad, alongside the Russians, also for years. Hezbollah operatives have trained Palestinian Hamas fighters from Gaza in Lebanon and Iran. Hamas gets rocket technology and training from Tehran.
It may be a stretch to believe that Russia knew of Hamas’ plans for mass murder, and the chaos that followed. But its abundantly clear that the more Russia can encourage Iran to threaten Israel through its proxies, the better it is for Putin.
Sam Kiley is an author and broadcaster who has covered Middle East events for 30 years
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