Dear Israel, Putin is not your friend. Putin was never your friend. He is a Jew-hating thug, living in a particular part of the world with a long history of Jew-hating thugs. And let’s face facts, Putin is a traditionalist.

On October 7, 2023 — which marked Vladimir Putin’s 71st birthday — Hamas carried out the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. More than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals were murdered, hundreds taken hostage, and entire communities reduced to ashes in a meticulously planned assault that many have rightly called a modern-day pogrom.

The brutality, the targeting of civilians, the glee displayed by the perpetrators — played out as, and seemed to evoke the darkest chapters of Jewish history under Tsarist Russia, when state-tolerated mobs slaughtered Jews with impunity.

That the attack fell on Putin’s birthday is no mere coincidence in my view. It was a symbolic “gift” delivered through Moscow’s long-standing proxies: Iran and Hamas.

While Western intelligence and the media have focused primarily on Tehran’s role, the more profound truth is that Putin, and the Russia he has rebuilt, were very much part of enabling — and perhaps even encouraging — the atrocity of October 7th.

The. October 7th, Massacre, exposed the real face of Putin, his regime, and the Russian Orthodox Church he so deeply loves and empowers: a face that has always........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)