The Ukraine crisis is a no-win situation for Israel, caught between America and Russia. But the impact of the crisis on Israel’s national security goes far further – taking in Iran, the Gulf and China
For most Israelis, Ukraine’s frigid, snow-shrouded expanses are far away, out of sight and out of mind.
Israel faces a perfect storm of problems if Russia chooses large-scale military aggression against Ukraine, Israel’s quiet but critical partner
3,000 kilometers separate Jerusalem and Kyiv. And that distance is probably why most Israelis don’t know how much their normal everyday life is already connected to Ukraine, or how much of what they take for granted actually depends on peace and stability in Ukraine.
Last week, U.S. President Joe Biden ordered a team of U.S. special operations forces to carry out a raid in northern Syria that is now stoking legal controversy. The mission targeted a residential compound where Islamic State leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi had been holed up with his family and civilian neighbors. By the end, al-Qurayshi and a disputed number of civilians were dead.
Recent signs of a thaw in ties between Israel and Turkey after a decade of frosty relations are yet another reflection of how the Middle East’s changing regional order is not only leading to the emergence of new relationships, but also to adjustments in old ones. The thaw is in part the result of a regional realignment that has left Ankara more isolated, but it is also being driven by Israel’s shifting priorities and Turkey’s urgent economic and political challenges.
Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has unveiled a new ballistic missile with a range of 1,450 kilometers (900 miles), which enjoys high agility and is capable of striking its designated targets with pinpoint accuracy.
The Permanent Structured Cooperation, or PESCO, is one of the building blocks of the EU’s Defense policy. It was set up in 2017 to enable EU member states to work more closely together in the area of security and defense. This permanent framework for defense cooperation allows willing and able member states to jointly develop defense capabilities, invest in shared projects, and enhance the operational readiness and contribution of their armed forces. To date 25 EU Member States have joined PESCO and subscribed to more binding commitments to invest, plan, develop and operate defense capabilities more together, within the Union framework. The objective is to jointly arrive at a coherent full spectrum of defense capabilities available to Member States for national and multinational missions and operations. The Council European Union today established the general conditions under which non-EU countries could exceptionally be invited to participate in individual PESCO projects, thereby paving the way for stronger and more ambitious defence cooperation with partners in the EU framework
The Islamic State, or ISIS, made global headlines recently on account of two significant developments in Syria: a prison uprising in Hasakeh in late January and the raid by U.S. special operations forces a week later, on Feb. 3, that resulted in the death of ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi.
The dire effects of massive jailbreaks a decade prior and the thousands of Islamic State convicts and suspects in Iraqi detention have induced greater attention to facilities in the country following an attack across the border.
Complex ties stretch across centuries and continents, but Turkey’s affinity for its ethnic kin is taking a backseat to global relations with Russia.
Ilmi Umerov, a Crimean Tatar political leader, was lying on a hospital bed in Simferopol, the capital of Crimea in his pajamas when Russian secret service agents carted him off to the airport and put him on a plane to Ankara with fellow Crimean Tatar political detainee Ahtem Chigoz.
War would bring Turkey under intense pressure from its Western allies to join putative sanctions against Russia, a critical trading partner and supplier of natural gas.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Feb. 3 meeting with his counterpart Volodymr Zelensky in Ukraine yielded a string of accords aimed at deepening economic and military ties between Ankara and Kyiv and thereby significantly raised the stakes for both sides should Russia attack the former Soviet state.