UOne conflict can hide another. The war that has just broken out between Israel and Hamas, and the risks of conflagration in the region that it fears, has pushed another war off the media radar, the one that Russia has been waging in Ukraine for twenty months. However, the two crises come together, through the actors who can benefit from them. First and foremost among them: Vladimir Putin.
The most obvious reason why this new explosion in the Middle East is timely for the Russian president is that, while Ukraine’s allies are turning fearfully south, Russia is resuming its offensive in Donbass.
These days, Russian forces are relentlessly shelling the area of Avdiïvka, a town of 30,000 inhabitants which now has less than 2,000 because it has suffered so much, in an attempt to dislodge the Ukrainian defenders. Since 2022, everyone in Europe knows the names of Mariupol and Bakhmut. But who today has heard of Avdiïvka?
The battle rages there. “The enemy is suffering significant lossesreported, Monday October 23, Ukrainian general Oleksandr Syrsky, but he constantly reconstituted his forces with the help of reserve troops, notably brought from Russia. » Not a word about Ukrainian losses; we can easily imagine them.
On Saturday October 21, a Russian missile killed six civilians in a postal sorting center in Kharkiv. Radio silence. From the beginning, Vladimir Putin has been betting that Western public opinion will eventually tire of the war in Ukraine. He could not dream of anything better than a new level of horror reached in the Middle East.
Fracture
There are other, less immediate, reasons why this crisis benefits the Russian president. He invaded Ukraine in the name of an imperial design: the conquest of a nation whose existence as a state he denies. The operations on the ground did not go as he had planned; the “nation that did not exist” resisted, supported by Western democracies.
On the diplomatic front, however, Russia encountered less resistance: the war highlighted a divide between these democracies, convinced of defending, with Ukraine, international law, and some of the states in the rest of the world which see only a European conflict and further proof of Western hypocrisy, based on “double standards”. The spontaneous solidarity of Western countries with Israel after the massacres of October 7 aggravated this divide, especially when the Israeli army implemented the blockade of Gaza, ordered the evacuation of its population from the north to the south and began bombing the territory.
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