... being a junior partner can lead to being held hostage to a major player’s game
The US-Israeli military campaign against Iran has reached its first critical juncture. It can be characterised as an attempt at a crushing, disarming strike. The targets ... ... suggest the following preliminary balance of gains and losses for the key participants.
Ivan Timofeev:
The Iranian Crisis and Russia: Seven Lessons
Israel
The country is at the forefront of the military operation against Iran. For Israel, the attack on ...
The situation surrounding Iran fosters a kind of fatalism among all parties—a mind-set that risks defining the geopolitical climate for years to come
... ... cost of the current invasion proves prohibitive for all parties involved. The situation offers several important lessons for Russia.
Ivan Timofeev:
Military Operation Against Iran: A Realistic Scenario?
Lesson 1: Sanctions are followed by the use of ...
Strategically, Russia has little to gain and a lot to lose in case the crisis goes deeper
In the early morning of June 24 US President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire between Israel and Iran after twelve days of intense airstrikes. The United States itself actively participated in this escalation cycle by hitting three major Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan on June 22. Though the American leader claimed that the ...
Will Russia continue its “business as usual” aimed at maintaining the existing status-quo or will it be forced to review and to revise its positions towards Israel, Palestinians, Iran and its main partners in the Arab world?
The spectacular comeback of Donald Trump to the White House will undoubtedly have a profound impact on the US overall international positioning, as well as on specific dimensions of the US approaches to ...
... large-scale border clash between Israel and Lebanon, and, finally, by an Israeli–Iranian war, which had been looming on the political horizon for years and was literally... ... parallels between Palestinian radicals and the Muslim Brotherhood movement (banned in Russia) at home, which has been driven deep underground, but was, alongside Israel,... ... But repeating the experience of the Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s, with hundreds of thousands killed and millions wounded, is now a no-go: Middle Eastern societies have changed...
... recently made frequent public declarations of their readiness to start the process of normalizing bilateral relations soon, with Russia as a mediator. Syrian President Bashar Assad, while receiving Russian President's Special Envoy on Syria Alexander Lavrentiev ... ... crisis, a tangled web of foreign policy contradictions has emerged between Ankara and Damascus due to the involvement of Russia, Iran, the United States and the GCC monarchies in the conflict. These were almost immediately compounded by domestic political ...
...
Vladimir Mikhailovich, not so long ago a delegation from MGIMO University visited Jerusalem and Ramallah, the administrative center of the Palestinian National Authority... ... West Bank.
And what issues were discussed during the visit?
We had a meeting at the Russian Mission to the PNA with the Mission’s head, Gocha Levanovich Buachidze, who... ... this point. Hezbollah is one of Israel’s main adversaries, all the more so because Iran is backing it. That being said, Hezbollah is deeply integrated into Lebanon’s...
... greatest of these changes is the China-mediated rapprochement between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Given that these countries are regional “centers of power”, their new and improved relations may help reduce regional ... ... could have been prompted by changes in Iran’s relations with other countries, especially its evolving cooperation with China, Russia and Saudi Arabia. If any agreement has been reached (which is currently too early to judge), it would only boost Iran’s ...
... problems rather than on foreign adversaries
Last week, CNBC published an op-ed piece by Frederick Kempe, a prominent US analyst and journalist. The author argues that in 2022 the US will have to focus on confronting the challenges coming from China, Russia and Iran. He suggests that these three nations will likely try to make use of the perceived US foreign policy weakness, which the recent American withdrawal from Afghanistan demonstrated in the most explicit way. Frederick Kempe also suggests that there is ...
... of the EUI Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies Report
2020 witnessed the peak of military tensions between the US and Iran since the conclusion of the tanker-war in 1987. The Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign and Iran’s resistance/retaliation ... ... US-Iran tensions a potential to easily evolve into a military engagement. What would be the implications of such a scenario for Russia? Will the fallout of a US-Iran war in the Middle East push Russia to rush in with a more active mediation effort? Or will ...
