Today on the Telegraph’s Ukraine: The Latest podcast, we bring you the latest updates from Ukraine, hear the news from the EU council meeting in Brussels and we interview a former Apache attack helicopter pilot.
In today’s episode, Assistant Comment Editor Francis Dearnley talks about the meeting between Russian officials and Hamas in Moscow.
Yesterday, Russian officials met with Hamas, who praised them for taking an active role in the war and released several pictures of the meeting between Russian officials, Hamas and Iran’s deputy foreign minister.
It has led to a wave of condemnation by many Western leaning countries. Israel has called it an obscene step that gives support to terrorism and legitimises the atrocities of Hamas terrorists. Some are going further and have asked whether it shows Russia is forming an axis of terror with Hamas, mediated by Iran, which already of course supplies Moscow with drones for its war in Ukraine.
Frankly, I’m shocked that people are shocked by this development as we’ve been discussing on the podcast ever since the attacks, all evidence seemed to suggest that Putin was willing to abandon his longstanding relationship with Israel in favour of closer ties with Iran and its Islamist allies, who carried out the terror attacks on Israel and have stepped up a bombing campaign on American troops in the wider Middle East.
Francis continues
It’s designed to show the global Muslim community, Arab states, that Russia is on their side, something that offers him numerous benefits in terms of international leverage and applying domestic pressure and distraction within many Western countries. I argue that Putin’s humanitarian interventions, and I say that very much in inverted commas, over events in the Middle East is and has to be understood as a cold blooded calculation.
Try telling the child of a parent killed in one of the thousands of Russian bombardments in Ukraine that the Kremlin believes innocent people, including women and children, should not be punished for other people’s crimes, which Putin claims is his motivation for these talks. In truth, in the unscrupulous world of geopolitics, the crisis in the Middle East is too good an opportunity for Moscow to miss.
For the first time in almost two years, as we’ve discussed on the podcast, international attention, at least in the West, has shifted away from the Kremlin’s disastrous special operation in Ukraine, offering Putin a leg-up back onto the world stage. But it’s not just Moscow that stands to benefit from this, so does China, who are all too eager to rally Arab nations and African countries, who are of course more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, to its side, hence why Moscow and Beijing just use their vetoes to block a US-drafted UN Security Council resolution condemning Hamas and expressing support for Israel’s right to self defence.
Speaking at the EU Council meeting in Brussels, Brussels Correspondent Joe Barnes relays his feelings on the priorities of the EU diplomats he speaks to.
It’s clear that Ukraine is still a massive, massive subject for them.
Because not only are they so engrossed in the subject, everyone’s thrown their hats in essentially. They’ve gone all in, if we were to use a poker analogy. But for some member states it’s more of a priority than others. So if you speak to the Easterns, the Baltics, I spoke to a Baltic diplomat yesterday and they were saying, look, Ukraine is still our number one topic and they were saying that our leader is going to really push and make sure that it is a priority for leaders.
We really need to carry on sort of fighting for Ukraine and helping Ukraine as best as we can. Others will focus more on Israel.
