Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse for Russian President Vladimir Putin, it has. The Ukrainians have turned the tables on their enemy and seized 1,000sq km of Russian territory in Kursk province, the biggest enemy incursion into Russia since World War II. Can the already overburdened Ukrainian military retain its gains? Every moment on the battlefield is fraught with risks.
Travel away from the cooler Russian-Ukrainian plains to the heat of the Middle East. Israel appears determined to fight a multi-front war with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. It’s also slapped the Iranians on the face by assassinating the Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. The Iranians, who don’t appear to be keen on an all-out conflict with a strong adversary, are figuring how to come up with a measured response to the assassination — because a response to such a strong provocation carried out on its soil there must be. Meanwhile, all of West Asia is on edge.
Putin faces the worst possible dilemma with the Kursk counter-invasion. In June, he said at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Kazakhstan he was willing to take forward a peace pact mostly hammered out between the two sides in Turkey earlier. “These agreements remain on the table and can be used as a basis for continuing negotiations,” Putin told delegates. The Russians insist the US and the UK worked together to scupper the deal.
Could an agreement have been struck? There were still many loose ends but crucially, both sides agreed Russia would retain the Crimea which it invaded in 2014. Crimea’s ports are vital for the Russian Black Sea fleet and for merchant shipping. Ukraine, in turn, could join the European Union trading bloc but not NATO or any other military alliance. Inevitably, there were stumbling points with Russia demanding Ukraine leave Donetsk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhya and Luhansk. Ukraine flatly refused to do so but it’s clear there’s enough ground for talks to start.
Now it looks like the Ukraine offensive is an attempt to gain leverage before a peace poker game begins. Kursk has a particularly bittersweet resonance in Russian military history. The Battle of Kursk in 1943 involved 3,000 German tanks and 900,000 soldiers and an equal number of Russian tanks and troops. It was a decisive turning point in the war and the start of the retreat that ended in Berlin. The Ukrainians also know the bloody lessons of World War II so should they think hard before advancing deep into Russia?
When Hamas launched its strangely uncontested attack on Israel last October, countries around the world shared Israelis’ grief and anger. The focus was on bringing back the Israeli hostages who had been brutally seized. But the global sympathy wave wore off rapidly as Israel smashed hospitals and schools in its broad attack on Gaza, turning the territory into an apocalyptic landscape where food and water are scarce and 39,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed.
Netanyahu on the offensive
Netanyahu leads a fragile coalition consisting of different shades of ultra-hardline right-wingers. The criminal cases against him are moving slowly through the courts but the consensus is he won’t last long once the war’s over.
This week, the Israelis shocked the world by bombing a Gaza school. It doesn’t appear even the US, Israel’s benefactor, can bring Netanyahu to heel. Netanyahu could easily bring his one-sided war to an end but he doesn’t even seem interested in repatriating the remaining hostages still with Hamas. Alternatively, he could spark a larger war that could engulf the entire Mideast region from Iran and Yemen all the way to Israel and Lebanon. Israel itself has come a long way from the democratic Middle East bastion that its founders wanted it to be. Instead, brutality to Palestinian prisoners is becoming common and senior politicians openly defend it on TV talk shows.
What’s common in both Ukraine and Israel is that the Americans are either unable or unwilling to bring both these infinitely dangerous wars to an end. Many people optimistically assumed the US would want to clean the global slate and end both these wars before the presidential elections later this year. Now it looks like they may not be trying hard enough to end the Russia-Ukraine war and they cannot restrain Netanyahu. Pax Americana appears to have been abandoned by the wayside in both war theatres. And the world can’t figure how to resolve these crises in very different corners of the world.