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As the world awaits President Donald Trump’s decision on possible U.S. involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict, another country entangled in a bitter war on its territory is watching Middle East developments closely — Ukraine.
Russia, which has ties to both Iran and Israel, could use the opportunity to extract gains and assume a prominent position on the world stage after years of facing isolation over its invasion of Ukraine.
Kateryna Shynkaruk, a senior lecturer at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, told HuffPost that the Trump administration’s perception that Russian President Vladimir Putin has influence on Iran could be deemed more useful than securing any progress on a Ukraine peace deal.
But the ongoing hostilities also present challenges for Putin as yet another one of his key allies in the region faces an existential crisis.
Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a stop to the G7 summit in Canada on Tuesday as he sought to rally support for his country as Russia escalates its attacks despite calls from the U.S. for it to scale back its offensive. Zelenskyy had a scheduled bilateral meeting with Trump which was abruptly canceled after the U.S. president cut his trip short over the events in the Middle East.
The cancellation of the eagerly awaited sit-down surely worried Zelenskyy as Putin seems to have Trump’s ear.
Trump spoke to Putin on Saturday, about two days after Israel launched its attack on Iran, to discuss Middle East developments with the authoritarian leader taking advantage of the situation to present himself as a mediator between Israel and Iran. This moment also offers Putin a change to emphasize what his country could bring to the table if relations between Russia and the U.S. are normalized — a prospect he has been pushing for.
What Putin “is doing very well is selling Donald Trump on the idea that Trump needs Russia,” Liana Fix, a fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote last week prior to Israel’s attack.
“This is not only for U.S.-Russia normalization business opportunities but also for solving other problems that the United States has, including its issues with Iran,” Fix added. “That is why Putin tries to sell Russia as an important interlocutor that will help the United States deal with Iran. That broadens the agenda in those talks and makes it easier for Russia to evade difficult questions on Ukraine.”
Putin blatantly ignored a recent two-week deadline set by Trump for him to show that he is seriously committed to reaching a peace deal with Ukraine, but the U.S. president seemed uninterested in punishing the Russian leader, even before the Middle East tensions became his main focus.
The U.S. also blocked a joint G7 statement in support of Ukraine this week, according to a Canadian official cited by The Associated Press, in fear of alienating Russia amid its said efforts to broker a peace agreement.
Against this backdrop, Russia launched its deadliest attack on Kyiv for this year Tuesday, while most of the world was distracted with the violence unfolding in the Middle East.
The conflict has also led to a spike in the price of oil — the engine of the Kremlin’s war effort — amid concerns about Iran potentially closing the Strait of Hormuz, which connects the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, where one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas consumption supply passes through. Besides, the possibility that defense material, particularly air defense systems, could be shifted away from Kyiv and toward the Middle East could lead to an escalation of civilian casualties in major Ukrainian cities, in yet another possible worrying prospect for Ukraine, Daniel Balson, the director for public engagement at Razom for Ukraine, told HuffPost.
Iran has been a crucial partner to Russia amid its brutal offensive. For instance, Moscow reached a deal with Tehran in the first year of the Ukraine war to allow it to produce Shahed drones domestically, enabling it to expand the production and attacks using those weapons.
The possibility of the current fighting leading to regime change in Iran would mean Russia would lose another key ally in the region after the fall of the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, who fled to Moscow after his government was toppled last year.
“There is very little incentive for Putin to actually put pressure on Iran, given how dependent he is on [its] weapons supply,” Shynkaruk said.
Shynkaruk, who is also a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told HuffPost that this presents an opportunity for Kyiv to raise skepticism about Russia’s motives when it comes to both the Iran-Israel conflict and its war in Ukraine.
But Nikita Smagin, an expert on Russia-Iran relations, told The New York Times that “Russia, when it comes to Iran, must weigh the possibility of a clash with Israel and the United States, so saving Iran is obviously not worth it.”
“For Russia, this is just a fact,” Smagin added.
Back in the U.S., the prospect of getting America involved in the fighting has exposed divisions between Trump’s MAGA base as some of his allies, including former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, have warned Trump against joining the war on Israel’s side.
Balson told HuffPost that Ukraine and its supporters are glad to see the isolationist voices in Trump’s constituency “losing ground politically,” given that those people are some of the strongest critics of Kyiv.
“I think that’s something that has given Ukrainians some hope with respect to what the future might entail in terms of U.S. support for Ukraine,” Balson said.
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