Dr. Shmuel Barnai of Hebrew University and Ben Gurion University sees the Moscow meeting between Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Russian President Vladimir Putin as a humanitarian act on the part of Bennett to help the Ukrainian people.
“When Prime Minister Naftali Bennett had to violate the Shabbat rules and to fly to Moscow, he did this humanitarian act to stop at least fighting and shooting and shelling of the urban areas in Ukraine by the Russian army and killing of hundreds and thousands of women, children and elderly people,” Barnai tells Israel National News.
“To stop this ongoing humanitarian collapse in such places like Mariupol – where actually more than one million citizens are blocked by the Russian army and they spend their time in shelters in some places to to save their life – this humanitarian action by the Israeli prime minister is really blessed.”
While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has expressed disappointment that the Israeli government has not explicitly announced that it sides with Ukraine, and that Bennett is seen as a mediator between both countries, Barnai explains that the Israeli position is necessarily strategic due to its position in the Middle East – where Russia, for instance, has a military presence in Syria – and the substantial Jewish communities in both Ukraine and Russia.
Despite European countries taking the unusual steps of supplying weapons to the Ukrainian military, Israel has continued to take a humanitarian approach to the conflict, which he hopes will be a “much more productive step.”
“We have two very big Jewish communities – one in the Russian Federation and in Ukraine. The last thing that we want is to harm their situation because of our steps. Russian forces are actually our neighbors here in the region. They control the situation in Syria. We have to remember when we make some steps against Russian aggression, we have to take into consideration all the possible consequences, both for the Jews in the Diaspora and for our security on our northern border, precisely Lebanon, Syria, the Golan Heights and all this region.”
When asked about when peace will return to the area, Barnai says that nobody is certain about the end game and when the violence will end. He explains that there are three components that will have a “tremendous impact” on how the war in Ukraine comes to a conclusion.
One: the Ukrainian army has exceeded expectations that it would “survive more than two, three or four days.” Two: Ukrainians have come together as a nation to fight the invasion when “previously we have we have seen many linguistic conflicts, regional conflicts, east Ukraine versus west Ukraine.” Three: the importance of how sanctions will demoralize the Russian economy.
“If they're going to keep these sanctions for a long period, we will see obvious results, with an impact on the Russian economy,” Barnai says. “It's already quite difficult and the harsh consequences will be only worse and worse. If we see these three elements keeping together, we may expect the Kremlin to go for some kind of a real negotiation to end the violence at least for the first step to end shooting on civil buildings in big and small Ukrainian towns, killing of women and children and civilians in their homes.”
