Mideast War: Blessing and Curse for Russia
In some ways the Israeli-Palestinian conflict likely benefits Vladimir Putin’s leadership. But it also magnifies potentially destabilizing ethnic and social tensions within Russia
Putin’s Birthday Present?
As the previous Natto Thoughts report noted, October 7, 2023 -- the day that Palestinian group Hamas launched a bloody incursion into Israel, sparking a new outbreak of war in the region -- happened to be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 71st birthday. Some Russia-focused observers, ever alert to how world events touch on Russia, referred to the attack as, in effect, a birthday present to Putin. Analysts have said Russia was probably not directly involved in the Hamas attack but nevertheless benefits from it.
Analysts have enumerated several ways the Mideast crisis helps Russia. As Berlin-based scholar Hanna Notte summed them up in an October 26 opinion column in the New York Times, “With minimal effort, Moscow is reaping the benefits from the regional chaos .... In three key areas — its military campaign against Ukraine, its designs on the Middle East and its global war of narratives with Western states — Russia stands to gain from a protracted conflict.” The events in Gaza distract Western countries from supporting Ukraine; undermine US President Joe Biden’s efforts to bring Israel and Saudi Arabia closer together; and increase disillusionment with the West among countries of the Global South.
In addition, the Mideast conflict provides other potential benefits to Russia:
If it were to escalate further, the conflict could push up the prices of oil and, by extension, prices for food and other commodities, the World Bank warned in an October 30 report. The Natto Team notes that a high oil price would bolster Russian government revenues, while rising gasoline, food and fuel prices could hurt incumbent Western governments as winter approaches and key election campaigns gear up.
The Hamas attack could tarnish Israel’s luster as a model for Ukraine. As the Natto Team has previously noted, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky has styled Ukraine as a new Israel, a high-tech, democratic “start-up nation” that aspires to bristle like a porcupine with Western weapons. However, during the October 7 attack, Israel’s reliance on high-tech defenses left it vulnerable, as Hamas destroyed sophisticated sensors and key communications points. Israel’s failure to block the attack drives home Ukraine’s own vulnerability. In addition, Ukraine has failed to criticize massive Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, opening itself to criticism for hypocrisy. Ukraine had sought support from countries of the Global South, portraying itself as a victim of Russian colonialism. However, “many Arab and Muslim countries see more similarities between Israel and Russia — as aggressive military powers — than they do between Israel and Ukraine,” as an October 30 Washington Post report noted, citing Randa Slim of the Middle East Institute.
The Mideast conflict has unleashed passionate disagreements worldwide within the political left, as coalitions based on shared commitments to peace, social justice and human rights have fractured amid mutual accusations of anti-Semitism or Islamophobia. The divisiveness of this issue plays into the hands of Russia and other adversary countries, weakening and distracting Western countries by inflaming internal discord. In the past, Russian information operations exploited the same identity-based passions in America in an effort to undermine the coalition behind the Women’s March of January 2017. That movement brought together activists advocating for women, LGBTQ persons, immigrants, and people of color, but within a year, this unity had fragmented. As the New York Times reported in 2022, Russian intelligence services and Kremlin-linked trolls, acting covertly through fabricated online identities, had contributed to poisoning this unity. The trolls “posted as Black women critical of white feminism, conservative women who felt excluded, and men who mocked participants as hairy-legged whiners.” They also stoked rage against one of the Women’s March leaders, a Palestinian-American woman who often criticized Israel. The trolls falsely described her as “a pro-ISIS Anti USA Jew Hating Muslim’” who “favored imposing Shariah law in the United States,” according to the New York Times. The misleading social media messages resonated with deeply felt loyalties; as one rabbi said, “There is so much Jewish pain here….Those Russian bots were poking at that pain.”
A poisoned gift?
The “gift” of the Israel-Hamas conflict also comes with peril for President Putin as he navigates the treacherous shoals of Mideast politics. Over the years Putin’s government has maintained ties with both Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Since October 7, however, Russian rhetoric has sided more firmly with Hamas. Russian state media have primarily blamed Israel and the US for the conflict. Hamas representatives visited Moscow on October 27, meeting there with top Russian and Iranian diplomats. However, Russia also cannot afford a complete break with Israel, as some analysts have argued. In an October 30 speech to his country’s security council, Putin conceded that Hamas had started the war with its “terrorist attacks” but denounced Israel for taking revenge “on the basis of collective responsibility, indiscriminately killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people” and laid ultimate blame on United States political elites. (He was exaggerating the number of Palestinian deaths, which Hamas authorities and UNICEF have estimated at over 10,000 as of November 8).
Pogroms Highlight Russia’s Own Ethnic Rifts
Denunciations of Israel by Putin and Russian state media may have had unintended consequences. Anti-Semitic incidents have been taking place in Russia’s mostly Muslim-majority North Caucasus region; rallies and graffiti have called for preventing Israelis from coming to the region and even expelling local Jewish residents. Notably, on October 29 in the Muslim-majority Dagestan region of Russia’s North Caucasus, hundreds of protesters stormed a local airport, uttering anti-Semitic slogans and bearing Palestinian flags; they swarmed a plane that had arrived from Israel and forcibly checked passengers’ passports, acting on rumors that refugees from Israel were arriving in the region. The incident sparked fear among Jewish residents as far away as Saint Petersburg, resonating with a long tradition of violence against Jews throughout the history of the Russian empire, where the term “pogrom” originated. “Pogrom” stems from the verb громить (gromit’), meaning to smash, crush, or assail.
Репродукция рисунка Владимира Вучичевича-Сибирского Черносотенный погром 1905 года в Томске (Reproduction of a picture by Vladimir Vuchichevich-Sibirskiy, “Black Hundreds Pogrom of 1905 in Tomsk). Date: before 1919. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The Black Hundreds were a nationalist movement in Russia in the early 20th century. An upsurge in pogroms accompanied the 1905 Revolution there. Evidence suggests that at least some of these attacks were not spontaneous but were “the policy of the Russian government directed toward the suppression of the revolutionary movement,” as historian Victoria Khiterer put it.
The October 2023 pogrom seems uncharacteristic for the people of Russia’s North Caucasus, who in recent decades have harbored little hostility to Israel or to Jews, according to Almut Rochanowski, a human rights advocate with long experience in the region. She suggests that local residents have been deeply moved by graphic images of Palestinian victims of Israeli strikes. Broader economic and social grievances also play a role, notes Prague-based Caucasus expert Emil Aslan, “You see that state propaganda is going against Jews and Israelis, you see there is injustice going on, that it’s inflicted on you . . . so you retaliate against a softer target.” Indeed, Russia’s North Caucasus region has experienced its share of injustice in recent years; young men of Dagestan have figured disproportionately among draftees for Russia’s meat-grinder assaults in Ukraine. Demonstrators in Dagestan protesting against military mobilization blocked streets and clashed with police in autumn 2022; these were the largest of any region in Russia, according to Russian independent media outlet Region.Expert.
The spark that lit this combustible material was a series of Telegram postings in the weeks after the October 7 events, claiming that Israeli refugees would be coming to the North Caucasus region and implicitly calling for “welcoming” them with violence. The “Morning Dagestan” Telegram channel was particularly active. According to the editor of a social media network that formerly oversaw that channel, “Morning Dagestan” is currently headed by Abakar Abakarov, a Dagestani anti-Putin activist who took refuge first in Ukraine and most recently in Turkey. Originally recruited for the Telegram channel to help stir up protests against the Russian government and its war on Ukraine – it was active in organizing the autumn 2022 protests against mobilization – Abakarov has used the channel to express anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas sympathies, according to independent Russian media site Meduza.
Another investigation by Russian independent news outlet The Bell found in “Morning Dagestan”s social media ecosystem a series of contradictory links with the Russian government, national socialism, and/or Salafi Islamism. On the one hand, someone with the “Morning Dagestan” administrator’s username, @hoch_choh, participates in online chat groups associated with a Russian marine unit and with national socialists. On the other hand, “Morning Dagestan” social media postings often echo those of the “Voice of Truth” channel and “Living Heart” association, founded by Abu Umar Sasatlinskiy, a Salafi Islamist preacher now in Niger, the African country whose pro-western government fell to a coup in July 2023. Another clue suggesting the organizers’ appeal to Islamist ideology is that the anti-Jewish slogans appearing in graffiti and Telegram postings in the North Caucasus, although written in Russian, used the Arabic-derived word “Yahud” rather than the Russian word “Yevrey” to refer to Jews. This suggests that the political agitation is appealing to “Islamist anti-Zionism,” as one Russian-born Israeli scholar explains. One of the “Morning Dagestan” posts reproduced in the New York Times combines this Islamist terminology with appeals to local resentments: “This is how we become masters on our own land!!! Alhamdulillah [Praise be to God]!!! … The earth must burn under the feet of the Yahuds in our land!!!”
Regardless of who stands behind the rumors about an imagined onslaught of Israeli refugees, the dynamic resembles that of an incident in the early days of the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020. In that incident, a planeload of Ukrainian evacuees from Wuhan, China, arriving in a small Ukrainian town of Novi Sanzhary, met with violence from dozens of local residents. A false email, purportedly from Ukraine's Health Ministry, had spread rumors that some of the evacuees were sick with the virus. In a similar incident occurring during the 2023 Mideast war, a far-right, anti-Ukrainian party in Romania spread false social media rumors claiming the Romanian government “had funded the evacuation of 3,000 Ukrainians from Israel, while doing nothing for Romanians trapped in the conflict,” according to the Financial Times. These incidents underline the power of misleading information, especially on hot-button issues such as refugees. (For more discussion on the dynamics of combustible material, oxygen and sparks, see the November 5 2023 posting in TL;DRussia by Sam Greene of King’s College London and the Center for European Policy Analysis).
Russian Government Stance Questioned
To some observers, Russian officials’ responses suggested either tolerance for anti-Semitic violence or fear of popular resentment. On October 29 Russian security personnel arrived at the airport before the protest began and made seemingly half-hearted efforts to restrain protesters, according to the New York Times. Afterward, local Dagestani authorities punished the rioters with a mere few days in jail. President Putin claimed that Ukraine and the West had stirred up the mob. As if to bolster this claim, Russian state media emphasized the fact that people associated with the “Morning Dagestan” Telegram channel had lived in Ukraine.
Others speculated that the Kremlin itself had incited the violence. Putin’s attempt to tie the local event into his narrative of Western aggression – that is, his effort to make “political capital” from the pogrom – suggested that “our leadership had a hand in this,” speculated Boris Smolkin, a Russian actor of Jewish background. Similarly, emigre activist Tatyana Vintsevskaya has asserted that the Kremlin deliberately provoked the pogrom in order to deflect attention from Dagestanis’ anger at being cannon fodder for Russia’s war on Ukraine. She draws a parallel to the rash of apartment bombings in Russia in 1999 that helped Putin justify the brutal Second Chechen War. Indeed, anti-Israel rhetoric on Russian state TV likely did help fuel the incidents. But Vintsevskaya’s hypothesis would also require that anti-Putin activist Abakarov was actually working on behalf of the Kremlin, rather than against it, when making his inflammatory Telegram posts. The apparent participation of the “Morning Dagestan” Telegram channel administrator in a Russian military unit chat group could bolster this claim, but further analysis would be necessary to disentangle the confusing clues on the people behind “Morning Dagestan.”
A different analysis of the authorities’ response, based more on culture, comes from Almut Rochanowski, the human rights advocate, who says that local officials in the North Caucasus failed to stop the violence because of “a pervasive mindset across the region: when men claim righteous anger and feel offended, they must not be held responsible for their actions, even if they deliberately engage in violence…..This way of thinking is also applied to wife-beating, so-called honor killings and political violence.”
Risk of Domestic Instability
Whether or not the Kremlin fanned the flames of the pogrom, regional leaders are warning against future demonstrations. Analysts agree the Russian government fears dangerous instability in the North Caucasus.
For years, Putin has relied on Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen warlord who helps keep the North Caucasus in check and serves as Putin’s emissary to Muslims within Russia and worldwide. In recent months, rumors have been flying about Kadyrov’s poor health and how long he can stay in power. Kadyrov reportedly appointed his 15-year-old son to a “high position” in a Chechen security service, raising questions about whether Kadyrov is appointing a successor in case of his own demise. The Kremlin likely fears a renewed upsurge of Islamism in the region similar the Caucasus Emirate, a jihadist organization in the North Caucasus that carried out numerous bombings in Russia in 2007-2015. Those attacks died down after many participants departed to fight alongside the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria. Sometimes the Russian government encouraged this outflow “in the hopes of exporting their internal insurgency problem,” as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute put it.
What Does It Mean to be Russian?
More broadly, the pogroms of 2023 raise questions about national identity in Russia, a multinational state that is using disproportionately non-ethnic Russian troops to fight a war that it claims is intended to protect the rights of ethnic Russians in Ukraine.
The Mideast events have sparked divisions even among Russia’s nationalist propagandists. For example, a probing commentary on Russian identity came from Alexander Khodakovskiy, long-time commander of a militia fighting for Russia in eastern Ukraine. In two Telegram posts on November 6, he concluded that “Russianness” is “not ‘ethnogenetic’, but rather a matter of morals and ideologies, observing that Russian nationalism is ‘hysteria’ resulting from a lack of consolidated Russian identity,” according to a summary of his words by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
Khodakovskiy’s post, and inflamed responses to it by other Russian nationalists, point to ongoing stresses in Russian society that the North Caucasus incidents highlighted.
Through a Glass Darkly
Natto Thoughts published a report in April entitled “Russia After Putin: Dictatorship, Democracy, or Chaos?” It discussed various grim scenarios for Russia’s future, including fragmentation along ethnic or regional lines. Subsequent events have disproved some of the assumptions in that piece; the Natto Team did not predict that dramatic upheavals – a mutiny by mercenary Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s Wagner military force, followed by its apparent demise as a political force – would take place even while Putin remained in power. Nevertheless many of the stress factors and political players outlined in that report remain, as do the widespread fears of chaos, fueled by collective memories of past “times of trouble.” Seen from this perspective, the Mideast war and the pogroms that followed indeed seem to represent a poisoned gift for Vladimir Putin.