Putin warns Israel: Selling arms to Ukraine would provoke Russian S-300 sales to Syria too

DEBKA

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s warning to Israel against selling arms to Kiev – in retaliation for the S-300 air-defense missiles Russia has released for Iran – adds a European dimension to the dispute by planting Israel squarely in the middle of Moscow’s Ukraine dispute with the United States. The Russian leader’s implied threat to hit back by sending the same missile system to Syria as well as Iran, touches on another dispute between Russia on the one side and the US and Israel on the other, namely the Syria conflict.

Whereas critics of the Netanyahu government highlight its falling-out with the Obama administration over the Iranian nuclear issue, they disregard the intense US-Israeli military cooperation in two vital regions of conflict – Syria and Ukraine.
This working relationship is not lost on Putin.

The intelligence updates placed on his Kremlin desk reveal that, just as the US and Israel (and Jordan) have been arming rebel forces fighting in southern Syria, they are also working together to give the Ukrainian army the weapons for breaking its incendiary standoff with the pro-Russian separatists.

In the last fortnight, thousands of military advisers from the United States, Canada, France, the UK and Germany were shipped into Ukraine to train the national army. Due in the coming days are 290 officers and troops of the American 173 Airborne Brigade.

DEBKAfile’s military sources disclose that the arrivals are gathering at the Ukrainian Army’s training center in Yavoriv, near Lvov, chosen as assembly point and launching pad for Western and NATO intervention forces in the Ukraine conflict because of its proximity to Poland.

The US and British air squadrons stationed there for some months are close enough to give the Yavoriv center air cover. Also at hand as reinforcements for the Ukrainian military effort are the US and British military personnel, who were posted to Poland after Russia’s annexation of Crimea last March, to allay the fears of the Baltic states.

Putin has repeatedly cautioned Washington that arming Kiev with US offensive weapons would bring forth matching Russian steps that would hurt US interests in Europe and other parts of the world.
He tried sending this warning through German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande, as well as addressing it to Secretary of State John Kerry at his meetings with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Moscow, said the warning message, would not spare US interests after what Putin sees as the Obama administration’s assaults on Russia’s national security, by means of NATO’s creeping absorption of Ukraine and offensive arms if provided by the US for Kiev’s campaign against pro-Russian separatists.

Lifting the embargo on S-300 air defense missiles for Iran was the Russian leader’s first step toward making good on his warning, but his reprisals are not likely to stop there.
The anti-air missiles have not yet been shipped to Iran, but if President Barack Obama forges ahead with expanded military assistance to the Ukraine government, Putin intends sending S-300s not just to Iran,but to Syria as well.

Saturday, April 18, the Russian president declined to say in answer to a question whether Moscow had refrained from sending S-300 missiles to Syria at Israel’s request. But he tellingly mentioned Syria in the same breath as his warning to Israel not to supply weapons to the Ukrainian government, saying that the move would be “counterproductive” to efforts to reach peace in east Ukraine.

In Washington earlier on Friday, Obama said he was surprised that Russia’s suspension of missile sales to Iran had “held this long.” The US president noted that Putin had previously suspended the sale “at our request. I am frankly surprised that it held this long, given that they were not prohibited by sanctions from selling these defensive weapons.”

The US president has chosen Ukraine as his arena for a showdown with the Russian president. Putin however, prefers to mount his challenge in Iran and Syria.

April 20, 2015 | 9 Comments »

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9 Comments / 9 Comments

  1. @ dov katan
    So consider the arms sales by Israel to Ukraine vs Russia to Iran in THEIR contexts.

    France, Germany, Italy and possibly Japan have also provided nuclear industry technology and expertise to Iran.

    Russians are historically anti-Semitic?
    And who isn’t historically anti-Semitic? The Eskimos?

    Efraim Halevy is not being intellectually honest is that quote. In the first place, Russia, or more precisely the Russian Empire, ceased to exist in 1917.

    In August 1939 no one in Kremlin had any doubt that Germany was about to attack Poland, which was, as far as Stalin was concerned, a part of the Soviet Unition, temporarily made independent. Stalin made decisions to reattach all former parts of the Russian Empire to the USSR immediatelly in the wake of his assumption of power in Moscow, and the Pact simply reflected this; every effort was made to produce a Red Army capable of defeating Germany in the near future. Germn OKW became aware of this, and a decision was made to pre-empt this intention, attacking USSR while the armed forces were in the midst of reorganisation AND deployed forward in expectation of commencing an offensive into Germany. Only the fact that many of the units were not fully mobilised yet prevented a complete loss of defensive capability, limiting losses to three million in th efirst six months of Barbarossa.

    The Pact was therefore a strategic diplomatic-military instrument and not an expression of ‘Russian’ (sic.) anti-Semitism.

    In 1953, when Stalin tried to exectute the second Holocaust of Soviet Jews, it was stopped by an ethnic Russian.

    The Russian Federation supports Hezbollah?

    Quite frankly if I was Putin, I would support Assad also. I would rather have Assad’s regime in control of Syria than a multitude of post-Syria enclave states, some of which are likely to be ruled by fundamentalist Islamic butchers. As I see it Russia’s support of Assad is directly aiding Israel in ensuring the focus of whatever is happening in Syria is not directed at Israel.

    Iran is a different story. With every sale of arms to Iran, Russia is gaining greater control over global oil market that aids its Economy. How is this anti-Semitic? Some issues of national strategy are guided by geopolitical considerations devoid of ideologies.

    When you say “we”, you are speaking for whom?

    You deny the right of Russian soldiers to be in “Ukraine”? You aso deny the ethnic Russians that live there to speak Russian? As I recall quite a few American Jews formerly of the US armed forces fought for Israel in 1947. Many of their children still serve to prevent creation of an Arab ‘Palestine’, which is no different to a ‘Ukrainian’ Ukraine.
    Just like there are no ‘Palestinians’, so too there are no ‘Ukrainians’, since Ukraine comes from ‘u kayu’, meaning” on the borders of” Russia. It is an utterly imagined state which coalessed in the vacuum of post-Khazar, pre-Ottoman steppes.
    Sounds familiar? Israel was re-created by the un in the vacuum between European imperialism and Arab nationalism.

    Russians have a history too, and sometimes it is worth looking at maps outside of the Manhattan eruv.

  2. The Russians are historically anti-semitic! Do not forget before Hitler turned on Russia in WWII that, “In the prime minister’s historical review of the 1930s on Holocaust Day, he forgot to mention that there was another player in Europe, Russia, which addressed the growing Nazi threat that is compared today to the Iranian danger. Russia didn’t try to appease – it signed a pact with Germany.”

    The Russians have and still do support our enemies Syria, Hezbollah, Iran. So if we find a way to hurt their interests I will not be crying any tears. Even for the non-existent Russia soldiers in the Ukraine.

  3. Putin actually does not want Israel to sell Ukraine certain missiles and drones. These could kill a lot of his soldiers who are not in the Ukraine according to Putin.

    Putin has provided Iran nuclear technology and other arms. He views Israel as an ally of the USA (which it is like it or not) and so since a new cold war has started Putin is threatening Israel.

    Since Obama is weak with no consistent foreign policy US allies are in vulnerable positions.

  4. Arnold, there are no ‘superpowers’.
    The only real power in the World, Universe included, is God.

    Israel is already one of the most powerful nations on the planet, to which Ted testifies sometimes on weekly basis – we as a people are the greatest per capita problem solvers in history. We get creativity min hashamiayim.

    Neither China, nor India approach Israel even close to our creativity.

    Israel has more in common with Russia than the United States.
    The United States assumed its own ‘choseness’ evolved from Xtian beliefs, and translated this into an ideological self-proclaimed mission to deliver democracy to the World, but one she has failed in fairly consistently, but which her leadership is incapable of abandoning despite the ruin this path takes her to. And, democracy doesn’t even work, so hardly worth the effort.

    Russians too had a vision for the World, one borrowed from Germany, but Russians were able to abandone it and change without eing forced to do so.
    Have you ever tried to change? It is the most challenging of all human expereinces, and is largely why HaShem said lekh lekha to Avram avinu.

    Israel and Russia also share a sense of trauma that Americans can’t fathom. Interestingly the Chinese and Indians too had their massive losses of life, but these don’t seem to translate into national trauma the way the Second World War did in the Russian consciousness.

    Machiavelli once wrote that princes should see to it that they are either respected or feared; what they must avoid at all cost is to be despised. Increasingly over the course of the 20th century American presidents are more dispised by more people around the World, including Americans. I doubt any Russian will say they love Putin, but they do respect him, and many around the World fear him. Few dispise him outside of Chechnya, and perhaps Western Ukraine.

    Had the Russian Empire trated her Jews differently, it would probably still be around today, and much stronger than the Federation is now. Consider the effect Jews had on the United States. All because of one pasuk.

    I think Russian leadership would rather have Israel as a close friend. Russia today depends for 80% of its resource extaction equipment on Western systems, 80% of her medications come from Western Europe and the USA, and its commercial electronic transaction systems are dependent on the United States. Since all these, and others, are forms of erroding sovereignity, I think Russian leadership would be significantly happier if its sources of supply were substantially diversified and coming increasingly from nations that have no way or cause of threatening Russia with ‘behavioural modification’ policies.

    How much that change benefited Russia, or if it is the right kind of change is another issue, but the point is that they were able to change. America has not.

    For Israel too a diversified source of support, military, diplomatic, economic and socio-cultural is a good thing. It closely paralleles Talmudic guidance on financial managment.

  5. I wonder what prompted this? Why would Israel in any way support the Ukrainian regime that is backed by West Ukrainian nationalists who widely promote their anti-Semitism. Besides this, whom would Putin sell the S-300s in Syria to, and why would Syria need them?

    And, Israel has had access to the S-300 technology, at least export versions, for some years. There is only so much that can be consealsed by omission in a system like the S-300.

    It seems to me this Putin’s warning is not intended for Israel at all.

  6. @ Eric R.:

    V V Putin, chief of state of the Russian Federation, one of the three superpowers of today’s world, is not my buddy, Eric. So you don’t need to crack wise about it.

    But I want Israel to be on the most friendly of possible terms with his country and China. Both those countries, along with India, in one way or another, will be the powers the Jewish state and the Jewish nation must get along with in the years to come. Western Europe, other than Germany, counts for nothing anymore. The power of the USA, unless there is a complete reversal of everything this country has done in recent decades, will rapidly degenerate. Africa and much of Latin America counts for little or nothing.

    I recognize power when I see it, Eric. That’s the kind of power that I want for the Jewish nation and the Jewish state. Obviously on a scale relative to the population size of Israel. Nonetheless, good will of the nations comes solely in relation to the power any particular society can command.

    Over the centuries since the breakup of David and Shlomo’s united kingdom of the Jewish nation, that nation of ours has been repeatedly squashed flat, trod upon by everybody and anybody, gassed to death in special-purpose factories, and left with no rights whatsoever other than what our people were able to conquer.

    So conquest and power are all that I respect now. And my particular form of Judaism is prayer for whatever the Jewish nation needs to take more land for the Jewish state and to expand the Jewish population by doubling it every 40 years.

    And I apologize to nobody for anything I write about this particular topic.

    Arnold Harris
    Mount Horeb WI

  7. @ ArnoldHarris:

    Arnold, I have not been too impressed with your buddy Vladimir’s performance as of late, especially when it comes to Iran. Having said that, this warning is an empty one, because Israel never had serious plans to arm the Ukrainians; they did not vote to condemn Russia last year at the UN, and the Israelis typically care for the Ukraine about as much as Arnold Harris does.

    🙂

  8. Russia’s interests in Ukraine are paramount. Israel’s interests in that place is all but insignificant. The facts, plain and simple, suggest that Israel should avoid going out of its way to do anything in Eastern Europe that even suggests siding with Russia’s permanent enemies. These include NATO, the European Union, Obama’s administration in Washington, and any of the post-Soviet states that broke away from Russia during the post-Soviet collapse.

    Israel’s probable hopes likely include the USA re-engaging itself in the fight both against ISIS and all its affiliates, and Iranian encroachments in fomenting civil wars all across the Middle East, and above all, taking on the task of destroying Iran’s growing threat of nuclear enrichment facilities which, if not neutralized, shall surely lead to deployable nuclear weapons in the hands of the Iranian ayatollist-controlled dictatorship.

    But none of that will occur, not merely with Obama running the government, but probable also under any other US government. And no matter what actually occurs in coming years, the great powers that will increasingly dominate the Middle East are Russia and China. That being the case, the foreign policy of Israel should at least significantly study ways in which the Jewish national reputation for cleverness could be put to use in the service of those two great empires.

    And I am not interested in reading holier-than-thou responses about how nasty and untrustworthy are either the Russians or Chinese. Because the day will come when Israel must have relatively close and mutually-useful relations with both these great civilizations. Either that, real trouble lies ahead, of a type not seen since the late Roman Republic began turning its increasingly imperial interests toward domination of the entire Middle East, including the last Jewish state in that area prior to the modern State of Israel.

    If you can neither defeat them nor ignore them, you absolutely must give them reason to use benevolence in their relations with you.

    Arnold Harris
    Mount Horeb WI

  9. Decisions… decisions…
    Anyway…. Only Russian technicians can handle that system in Syria. The best the Syrians can get out of their own people is barrel bombs and chlorine bags experts.