Despite spending five months baiting Ukraine’s leaders as “neo-Nazis,” among them the country’s Jewish President Volodymyr Zelensky, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin didn’t bat an eyelid as he embraced a genuine Nazi sympathizer and Holocaust denier in the shape of Iran’s “Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Putin visited Tehran last week on his first trip outside the borders
of the former USSR since launching the invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24.
The immediate focus was not the war in Ukraine, but that other
Russian-fueled bloodbath in Syria. The main meeting brought Khamenei and
Putin together with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,
who is seeking Russian and Iranian backing for a renewed onslaught
against Kurdish forces in Syria. Putin refrained from making a formal
commitment to his Turkish counterpart, but he will have been reassured
by Erdoğan’s reference to him as “my dear friend,” and gratified by
Turkey’s shameful antics in holding up Sweden and Finland’s NATO
membership applications because of the backing of those two nations for
the Kurds.
The Tehran visit was an opportunity for Putin to showcase his status
as an international leader who is relied upon by two of the region’s key
influencers. It was also an occasion to address the dire state of both
the Russian and Iranian economies as they labor under the weight of
international sanctions. Not coincidentally, on the day that Putin
landed in Tehran, the Russian energy giant Gazprom announced a $40
billion development and exploration deal with the state-owned National
Iranian Oil Company (NIOC). According to NIOC’s chief executive, Mohsen Khojastehmehr,
the influx of Gazprom cash represents the largest foreign investment on
record in the history of Iran’s energy sector. Additionally, it’s a
step that will further bind the deep ties between Iran and Russia—one an
authoritarian regime claiming Divine sanction, the other an
authoritarian regime promoting nationalist chauvinism, both of them
sworn enemies of Western democracy.
It’s highly unlikely that anyone outside of Russia—where the drumbeat
of official propaganda through state media channels has turned much of
the populace into “zombies,” as the Ukrainians like to say—will have
been persuaded by Putin’s grandstanding. Russia’s poor military
performance, particularly in the opening phases of the war, punctured
the notion that Russian forces are a match for NATO’s combined armies.
Now, admittedly, the situation is becoming more complex, with Russia
maintaining its heavy assault in the east of the country and preparing
the breakaway regions of Luhansk and Donetsk for “independence.”
Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, has even
suggested that Russia will take the war deeper into Ukrainian territory
as a result of the US provision of high-mobility artillery rocket
systems (HIMARS) to Ukrainian forces. “If the West delivers long-range
weapons to Kyiv, the geographic goals of the special operation in
Ukraine”—Russia’s Orwellian euphemism for its war of aggression—“will
expand even more,” Lavrov told state media outlets last week.
The delivery of the HIMARS system to Ukraine has already yielded
results on the battlefield, enabling the destruction of some 30 Russian
command centers and ammunition depots, according to the Ukrainian
defense ministry. Ukrainian commanders are clamoring for more aid and
training as they try and turn the tide against the Russians, who have
already lost 15,000 troops through the invasion, according to a CIA
assessment—more than seven times the number of US military personnel who
were killed in Afghanistan in the entire period after 2001. But as
vulnerable as Russia has shown itself to be and as contemptuous as it is
towards the lives of its own soldiers, as well as the beleaguered
Ukrainians, there is no sign of imminent defeat and no indication that
Putin is planning to leave office. Being battered and bruised is not the
same as being defeated, as the Russians have learned many times during
their history.
The point, however, is that a continued stalemate, whereby the
Russians are in control of much of Eastern Ukraine but repelled from
further advances by the Western-backed Ukrainian forces, isn’t tenable.
As long as Russia occupies Ukrainian territory and prevents the Kyiv
government from accessing its Black Sea ports, the rest of the world
will be dragged further into an energy and food crisis, with a recession
lurking around the corner. Internally, Russia’s only option is to
become more repressive, choking off alternative sources of information
and carrying out mass arrests of anti-war activists and political
dissidents. So, if the price of securing a Ukrainian victory seems too
high, it’s worth remembering that these are the costs of not doing so.
As is often the case, Russian Jews have been the proverbial canary in
the coal mine when it comes to the boosting of state repression in
Russia. Along with their constant propaganda jibes about neo-Nazis in
Ukraine, Russia’s leaders have abused and distorted the Holocaust
in their failed bid to persuade the outside world that the invasion of
Ukraine is the unfinished business of World War II. Then, last week, the
Russian Ministry of Justice announced that it was seeking a court order
to close down the
local operations of the Jewish Agency for Israel, alleging that it had
violated Russian law by maintaining a database of Russian citizens
seeking to make aliyah to Israel.
There are some ominous parallels between the move against the Jewish
Agency and the notorious “Doctor’s Plot” in the Soviet Union in 1953. As
the post-war USSR turned venomously against its Jewish community, a
group of mainly Jewish doctors was accused of attempting to poison the
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. The American Jewish Joint
Distribution Committee (JDC), a humanitarian organization that had been
assisting needy Soviet Jews since the 1917 revolution, was identified
as the “Zionist spy organization” behind the supposed conspiracy.
Now, almost 70 years after the “Doctor’s Plot” laid Soviet
anti-Semitism bare, fabricated tales of “Zionist spies” are filtering
their way back into the legal system and the state-run media in Russia.
Meanwhile, Russian representatives in Israel have been saying in
soothing tones that the Jewish Agency facing closure is Israel’s fault
for having the temerity to speak out in defense of Ukraine’s
sovereignty; if that stops, then so will we, they emphasize.
Yet again, a ruling regime in Moscow is using its Jews as a
bargaining tool; this time, only a serious military setback will force
them onto a different path.
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