Olga Kirschbaum-Shirazki: I want to start with your thoughts on recent developments that connect these two wars: Ukrainian military assistance to the Gulf states against Iran. Is this incidental or are the wars connected?
Vladislav Davidzon: The Ukrainian and Israeli files have long been intertwined in ways that have been obvious to area experts but are only now becoming intelligible to the broader public.
I want to begin by relating the story of where I was when I learned that the Israelis had started the 12-13 day war against Iran last summer. I was having my breakfast in a nice hotel restaurant in Kyiv at nine in the morning. I checked my phone and saw that Netanyahu had begun bombing the Iranian regime’s anti-air defense systems — thus softening them up for this next war. Since I had developed a reputation as a kind of unofficial “Ukraine-Israel politics explainer” in certain circles I began receiving all sorts of text messages from all sorts of friends. One, a highly placed member of the Ukrainian parliament. texted me: “thank God for Israeli defense forces! AM Yisrael Chai!”
And this was not a Jewish guy. Is that not remarkable?
OKS: Yes. Tell me how did this come to be?
VD: So the Iranians became co-belligerents very early in the Russian-Ukrainian war. They had been a participant in the war against Ukraine (whether direct or indirect is a matter for the international lawyers) along with Belarus and the North Koreans from the outset. Iranian-made Shahid drones were flying around killing our people starting in my Ukrainian hometown of Odessa where they were first deployed. The Iranians had promised Zelensky that they would only deliver a single load of drones to the Russians and would stay out of the war thereafter. That obviously didn’t happen. Instead Iran deepened its involvement. 57,000 Iranian-made as well as the Russian-made (and improved) copies targeted Ukrainian civilian and military targets. That is the number that Zelensky stated a few months ago. Most of those drones were no longer being assembled by the Iranian regime because it taught the Russians how to make them and the Russians set up production facilities in order to mass produce them. The Russians also added significant technical improvements to those drones, which according to American reports have been operating in the Straits of Hormuz. Also, though many people don’t realize this, there were Iranian liaison officers to the Russians, teaching them how to use those missiles and drones. Some of those Iranian advisers were operating on Ukrainian territory in occupied Ukrainian bases! So Iran literally invaded Ukrainian sovereign territory. Along with the North Koreans soldiers deployed in the Russian (Kursk) direction, this was the second Asian power to invade Europe during the course of this war. So you have a situation where the entire Ukrainian population, the Ukrainian military, and the Ukrainian President all actively detest the Iranians and see Ukraine as being part of a larger (anti-Tehran) coalition. Ukrainian athletes— kids — often refuse to shake hands with Iranians at international sporting events. That is they see themselves as part of the Sunni-Arab coalition as well as the American-Israeli coalition against the Shia-Axis aligned with the Russians. The ever tightening relations between Israeli and Ukrainian intelligence services is an outcome of that tendency. As is the stationing of Ukrainian anti-missiles in American bases and Arab bases all over the region.
The backdrop to the merging of the two files is Russia’s embrace of Teheran. After October 7 Russia had to make a strategic decision to make: whether to stay neutral or to downgrade the Israeli relationship, which they had long prized and cultivated. They downgraded the relationship to Cold War levels of transnational frostiness. Jerusalem-Moscow relations have not been worse since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, even as the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria has taken the Russian military off the Israeli border. Instead Russia and Iran signed a twenty year-long comprehensive strategic partnership treaty in January of 2025. Though Western wags teased that the Russians did not come to the direct aid of Tehran when the direct confrontations with American began, they cooperate extensively on military trade, share intelligence, swap expertise on sanctions busting, and oppose Western influence all across the world. The infamous Russian “ghost fleets” of sanctions-busting oil shipments has relied heavily on Iranian networks and assistance.
OKS: How is it the that the Europeans, specifically the Western Europeans, have constantly been saying that the war with Iran is not our war? Don’t they comprehend that the Iranians are co-belligerents, and see that the Ukrainians, as you’ve described, are happy about the joint Israeli-American attacks.
VD: The Ukrainians are more than happy — I would say that they are thrilled! Other than the obvious trade off costs of course. Those being that Ukraine is no longer the main story. As well as the decline of attention and resources that are the outcome of America’s and Trump’s decision to lift sanctions on Russian oil exports temporarily, which took place and have replenished funds for the Russian war machine for a long time. Many of us in the analyst community thought that warnings — made six months ago — of American involvement in the Iran campaign depleting the availability of anti-missiles resources for Kyiv were a non-issue. That turned out to be wrong. The Russians have been hitting Kyiv every night with ballistic missiles because the Americans simply do not have enough of them to share. But overall Ukrainian public support for the attacks on Iran remains very high and why would it not be? The Iranians have been killing Ukrainian servicemen and civilians for years.
OKS: So what is it that the rest of Europe doesn’t understand that the Ukrainians do?
VD: I mean, we have a joke in my line of work that this understanding gets weaker and weaker the further one is located from the Russian border. It is something that is understood very well by the Balts, the Romanians, the Hungarians, the Bulgarians, and to a certain extent, the Germans, right? The British have been excellent. Other Western Europeans have had to wake up from their comfortable post-Cold War slumbers and learn what the Eastern and Central Europeans have long understood: imperialist and ideologically oriented, fanatical states simply cannot be bought off. They must be defeated or at least contained militarily. They need to be deterred at the bare minimum. Though Ukrainians have until recently not had the external resources to expand on the Iran file, they have long understood that Iran is in many ways much like Russia. An expansive and imperialist state run by men with extreme historical grievances who export death and destruction to all of their neighbors. Swathes of populations in the West have not internalized that today the genuine imperialism of non-Western powers is far worse than any political interventions and pressures Western states are currently engaged in internationally. Ukraine is ground zero in the fight between the liberal, democratic, and multi-national postwar order and a revisionist and imperialist one. China, Russia, Iran, Belarus and North Korea are all allies in this war against Ukraine. The post-heroic age has exposed the rampant fecklessness and naivete of Western elites.
But more to the point, Western Europe had attempted the economic integration strategy with Russia and failed. Russia saw the alliance with and endemic corruption of Western elites as a form of weakness and just kept on annexing territory. Just as the Americans did with Iran and also failed. Iran just kept extending their proxy networks and igniting more wars. Ukrainians understand this. Some Eastern European countries have tried to leverage and balance ties with both Russia and the EU, like Hungary and to a lesser extent Serbia and Slovakia, but they still share a historical understanding of what it is like to be attacked and invaded.
There is Eastern-Western-European psychological divide at work here based on the experience of Soviet domination. Certainly the Polish see things like the Ukrainians. I go to Warsaw very often. The Polish are in the middle of a massive and generational expansion of their military capacity. They’re putting almost 5% of their GDP into expanding their military (which is why the Trump people like them and have time for Warsaw). They’re extremely serious about this. The Czechs, under a previous government, were very good on this stuff. Under this new one, I think, there are some issues. The Czechs have been providing artillery shells to Ukraine in massive numbers.
There is an additional Eastern-Western-European divide based on nationalism. Ideals of nationalism. In Eastern Europe nationalism is tied to freedom, security, and national identity. The memory of what it is like to have Russian troops occupying your country is a serious catalyst to strengthening national identity and defending sovereignty. That is the case in Prague and Budapest. Or think about having to maneuver one’s politics around preventing the Soviet army from invading (The Poles and Solidarność). This leads to additional divisions on the acceptability of masculine and martial virtues. Memory politics are also different. This is all the outcome of the Cold War….
OKS: Is the divide also about Israel? In so far as the Iran conflict is about Israel, not just about Ukraine, are these countries less hostile to Israel?
VD: Yes, 100 percent, 100 percent, yes. The hostility of swathes of Western European and Canadian and American elites to Israel is the hostility of the post-historical towards those of us still stuck living through and in historical times. It is the view of a professional managerial class of post-historical, post-religious, post-national, and post-martial people who have never personally experienced strife, war, or privation. Spoiled and decadent people. The security that Americans provided to Western Europeans for three generations has had all sorts of unforeseen consequences, notably the contempt for the very sovereignty and security they have enjoyed. My own world view freely mixes liberal, left and right wing positions — so many people in New York, London and Paris find me very confusing. However, with regards to the issues of Western elite complicity, weakness, incompetence, and decadence in the face of imperialist or fanatical states like Russia or Iran — I am very much a traditionalist. A security hawk and a Hobbesian. That hostility of swathes of over-credentialed Western elites to Israel is naturally structural. It does not exist to the same extent or in the same form, in Eastern Europe at all. And in Ukraine, Poland, and Hungary, but also across Eastern Europe from the Baltics to the Balkans, certainly, there is tremendous respect for Israel having to do with its display of martial virtues and capacity to fight…. while also maintaining a national culture and high living standards coupled with technological progress.
This could be attributed in a facile way to the natural emergence of a “nationalist conservative international,” which many on the American left denounce as ‘illiberal” and “fascist.” But this is a misreading. Much of this is simply organic. For a Polish President or a man like Orban (before he lost the election), the Israeli leaders they meet with do not just strike them as strong, smart, and capable – they are also deeply familiar. Many were themselves Eastern Europeans three generations ago. Scratch any Ashkenazi Israeli — and two or three generations ago he was a Russian, Romanian, Hungarian, Czech, or Polish Jew — I am not talking about the German Jews. These are for the most part the descendants of Eastern Europeans, right? The specters of Fascism, the Holocaust, Communism, and World War II continue to shape the psychological underpinnings of state policies in Israel, Hungary, Czech, the Baltic countries, and in Poland. In a way that they simply don’t for the Portuguese and the Dutch. A Belgian Prime Minister or Foreign Minister simply does not get his Israeli counterpart on a visceral level. Eastern Europeans see Israel as a successful ethno-national-democratic state. Poland or Hungary transported to the Levant!
Eastern Europeans also have tremendous understanding for the need for a certain kind of national or nationalist virtue. This shapes their view of Israel. The Poles and Ukrainians see themselves as small and beleaguered post-imperial nation states that are surrounded by a vastly more wealthy, powerful, and well-armed neighbor(s) that has or (still) have wanted to destroy them. They understand Israel has enemies. Israel as “the porcupine state” — thanks to tech security — is an attractive model for many Eastern Europeans to follow. The Ukrainians certainly like the Israeli example: high-tech, fecund, self-confident, successful, traditionally virtuous, and economically successful. An ethnically blended national state that despite having to fight chronic wars against an overwhelming opponent really works and thrives. Israel is a much more traditional society than are Western European nations, which Budapest and Warsaw see as haranguing them in self-righteous tones from Brussels. I hear it all the time from Ukrainians — they understand the Israelis as strong. People that they could do business with. Likewise , among the Israeli public there is a widespread appreciation of all of this commonality, which is expressed in Israeli responses to the war. Especially, but not only, amongst Russian speaking post-Soviet emigres and their kids.
There is also just the matter of experience. There were Ukrainians, ethnic Ukrainians, and Ukrainian Jews who were all killed by Hamas and Hezbollah on October 7. For the Ukrainians, when they see Israel being bombarded by Iranian ballistic missiles, it doesn’t take much moral imagination to understand what that’s like. They are being bombarded by the same people and by those very same missiles. There is no difference to the average Ukrainian between the missiles and drones being provided to Hezbollah and to Russia. So there is a great deal of sympathy.
OKS: So there’s no leftover of the Soviet anti-Zionism?
No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. That just does not exist. I have never encountered it. Ironically it has been exported West and is a huge factor in the progressivism and third wordlist discourses taking over Western campuses. The intellectual history of that is quite clear to any Jew from the former Soviet Union. It is the outcome of Soviet influence on anti-colonial movements, on modern third worldism, on American academia and on the NGO complex. We see the result in the campus protests with the kids sporting hand glider tattoos and stuff like that… as well as the fact that the universities do not step in to protect Jewish kids or Israelis.
The little anti-Zionism that exists in Ukraine is recent and elite. The kind of fashionable anti-Zionism of the Western youth that has taken a forward position in Western circles is now visible certain limited sectors of the Ukrainian elite connected to Western discourses or Western NGOs. You see this elsewhere in Eastern Europe among elites with deep ties to Brussels. Some people I liked in Ukraine signed pro Gaza petitions and were uncomfortable when I discussed it with them. These Ukrainian MPs and social activists are often attacked by their political opponents as “Sorosyata” — as in “Soros’s little ones.” On occasion we do see a flare up of popular resentment sweeping through Ukrainian social media against Israel. This occurs when Jerusalem receives Western and American anti-air protection from Iranian missiles while Odessa and Kharkiv are left unprotected. But it is neither antisemitic nor anti-Zionist. People joke bitterly that if they simply transferred the Ukrainian capital to Jerusalem, American, and Jordanian and Saudi planes would be knocking the Russian missiles out of the sky.
OKS: Certainly Netanyahu’s government has noticed these cultural parallels and been seeking rapprochement with Eastern European countries. Even though liberal elites in Israel, Western Europe, and the US have been opposing it and condemning him for it, he’s done it. Why, in your view, has he not yet embraced an alliance with Ukraine? And what about Zelensky, we know it would like Israeli tech, but does he want a rapprochement with Israel?
VD: First of all, the Hungarians under Orban could be reliably relied on to block the most egregious anti-Israeli initiatives within the EU structures. This was done for both self-servicing and ideological reasons by the Hungarians (mirroring their opposition to pro-Ukrainian initiatives in Brussels). Also, Netanyahu had publicly bet much of his political legitimacy as an international statesman of great stature on the Russian relationship. Not to say that it’s not true, but this was also his self-perception and the message of his political campaigns over the last couple of elections in Israel. That was all based on his personal relationship with Putin. It was a relationship that was important to Bibi. He viewed himself as keeping Israel out of the Syrian civil war by keeping detente with the Russians. With the Obama administration attempting to ratchet down the American role in the Middle East, Moscow had become a much bigger military player in the region in the wake of the JCPOA.
All of this this led to a reasonable calculation amongst Israeli security elites that Moscow was a serious regional player. It needed to be respected. Russia was also a player on the border of Iran. They needed a good relationship with the Russians to keep Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Iranian IRGC operatives away from their own borders and from the Golan Heights. The Russians were marching through the Middle East and Northern Africa — setting up bases in Libya and taking sides in various African wars. Operating a naval base in Syria and making inroads into Egypt. On rather glorious occasions they even allowed Hezbollah guys who were operating in Syria to wear Russian uniforms! That was so they could not be targeted by the Israelis. So détente with Russia was a legitimate calculus for the Israeli defense establishment. Now that is all over. The Russians are now out of Syria and are now squarely on the side of the Iranians.
At the same time, the Ukrainian are now running their own AfriCorps! We are seeing Ukrainian Special Forces guys jumping out of American PMC helicopters as they hunt the Russian Wagner guys all over Africa. Which I frankly think is awesome. I personally can’t wait for Eric Prince to take over half of Africa on behalf of America with a hundred thousand Ukrainian special service guys. That will be based and awesome and I also personally can’t wait to write a modern version of Heart of Darkness with Ukrainian protagonists! Ukrainian anti-drone units are moving into the Gulf at the invitation of the Gulf Arabs…. Supplanting Russian air power in the Levant! My ironic literary ambitions aside the sooner the Americans defeat the Russians, Chinese, and Iranians in the Maghreb and West Africa the better for everyone.
The swift collapse of the Assad regime showed that the Russians no longer had the bandwidth, resources, and capacity to project power in the Middle East. So the bet that Netanyahu had made on the relationship with Moscow was no longer critically necessary after October 7. Ukraine is now ironically the successor state to the Soviet Union in terms of capacity to project air power in the Middle Eastern theatre. We thought Russia was a Middle Eastern power. Now it is Ukrainian army officers operating openly on American bases in Gulf states, all up and down the straits and all up and down the Gulf, right? Which to me personally is kind of amazing.
Though I’ve been pushing for the value of Israeli-Ukrainian security cooperation in conferences and on the front page of Haaretz and other newspapers and magazines for three years! — that is even before October 7 (of which my own mother was a survivor)! — I did not imagine this turn of events.
On the Ukrainian side, there has always been the desire to access Israeli technology. This is a primary consideration. That being said, Western European hostility to Israel and to Trump is factor with regards to an open alliance. Zelensky needs Trump’s assistance but he also deeply needs the continued help of the Europeans, so he does not want to go all in with the Americans and the Israelis. As a Jew he also paradoxically more concerned about being seen as too close to Israel than were his five predecessors in the office. I’ve had three out of five former Presidents of Ukraine claim to me personally that they were the best on the Jews! This is a kind of lovable trend amongst Eastern Europeans now, this competition for who loves their Jews more! This is also about reframing Communist and Holocaust memory and as well historical arguments about Fascism and opposition to the Soviets in the context of a Russian monopoly of WWII memory politics. All of this very complex and messy. Some even touches on Ukrainian national revisionism even as Moscow cynically torques history for its imperialist propaganda.
Ukraine also has excellent relations with Turkey and now also with the Gulf States (even with the Syrians!) The Ukrainians have much more to gain with tacit but sustained and deepening cooperation with the Israelis than they do with any formal alliance.
OKS: Netanyahu has also made another bet, with Trump. The question is, will his policy on Ukraine follow Trump’s policy whatever it is? And conversely will Zelensky follow Trump and Western Europe’s policy on Israel? Do you think either will develop and independent policy?
VD: Look, it’s a multi-vector problem. Israelis possess the anti-missile technology that the Ukrainians badly need. Ukraine is doing much better on unmanned drone vehicles and in keeping Russian infantry pinned down with drone innovations as the whole world is learning. They are incredibly good at attriting the Russian infantry but they have very limited options in terms of air defense. Which makes them have to make difficult decisions in terms of allocating resources. They have a set of very bad choices because they need a defense canopy over the country that they simply don’t have. If they put the air defense systems on the front lines, Kyiv and other cities are open to certain kinds of ballistic and cruise missiles. If you defend the south around the Odessa ports, then the Russians can bomb the north. These are hard trade-offs that Kyiv is having to negotiate. This is a major source of tension. Zelensky at one point complained that he had not spoken to Netanyahu in two years. The anger boiled over a few months ago into a full on diplomatic crisis after Israelis received Russian shipments of stolen Ukrainian grain. The Israelis had simply allowed the shipment of Russian grain to go through, though they knew it was stolen. But the storm has blown over. The foreign minister of Ukraine wagged his finger at the Israelis over Twitter… and the situation was eventually resolved diplomatically. These are things that will go away very quickly if they’re amended, if Israel continues to win, and if the relationship gets better.
At the end of the day the relationship between Ukraine and Israel is conditioned by both sides calculating the wider international political risks of being seen as too close. The personal relationship between the two leaders is much worse than the structural relations between the respective state apparatuses and military liaisons. On intelligence sharing and military cooperation, the relationship is much better than Israelis make it known publicly. There’s an element of discretion here on both sides. A kind of courtesy towards the Arab members of the coalition who are still weary of being associated with Israel.
OKS: So just let me understand this clearly. The lack of communication between Zelensky and Netanyahu primarily results from Netanyahu’s policy towards the Russians. But underneath that, the military ties have changed in relation to the changing Russian position and the changing Ukrainian presence in the Middle East?
VD: Right. That’s right. Yeah.
OKS: There have been other changes since October 7, namely an expansion of and even shift in understanding of the Abraham Accords with the accession of Kazakhstan and the discussions about maybe Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan joining. Do you think that we’re potentially moving towards an Eastern European-Central Asian-Gulf bloc against Russia, Iran and China, without Western Europe.
VZ: We will see the development of overlapping regional defensive blocs in the near future. Zelensky has talked about this. He has mentioned an alliance with Turkey in some conversations. With the Norwegians and the British in others. There will be situational alliances that will develop. One might potentially recall the (Ukrainian)-Lithuanian-Polish commonwealth. If the European Union were to develop its own armed forces outside of the NATO command structure, it would be easier for them in certain ways to have Kyiv on board. Kyiv’s world class anti-missile tech is only the most obvious way for Ukraine to provide tremendous value to everyone. I mean, they are already arguably the best in the world at this. If you’re a Gulf Arab state, you can knock an Iranian Shahed or missile out of the sky with a million-dollar missile. But the Ukrainians can do the same thing with a $17,000 interceptor drone. As the stockpiles of Western made Patriot missiles are used up, Kyiv will have more and more leverage in those negotiations. Kyiv has the potential to provide the world’s air defense shield. They will be able to sell and lease that experience to lots of state and non-state actors.
But the situation is very dynamic. If you’re in the Ukrainian general staff or part of the presidential administration, you’re watching very carefully who’s willing to do what. And if the Trump administration and the West really are offering something in terms of a security architecture, you have to price in who’s willing to do what. The thing about Article 5, it’s the Schrodinger’s cat of security guarantees. You don’t actually know who’s willing to fight until they’re called to do so. And now you actually have real-time information about who does what when the Trump administration calls. Now, obviously, with regard to the operation against the Iranian regime there were no consultations with the European allies, and obviously, lots of people in Europe understandably dislike certain things that the Trump administration has done. And yet, NATO is supposed to be a security alliance, and there’s a major war going on. Not participating is one thing, but closing your air bases and basing rights to American overflights is quite another. So Ukraine is taking notes regarding all current and future alliances. Relations with the Poles have degraded recently because of the same interwar memory politics issues that I have already touched on. Kyiv’s memorialization of interwar Ukrainian nationalists who were anti-Semitic and anti-Polish has had a blowback effect, and will likely put a crimp on future military relations between the two states even if this is a ridiculous issue to divide an alliance in the midst of an existential war!
OKS: We have two relatively small states, Ukraine and Israel, who both have a very sought-after specialty and excellence.
VD: Right. And who are currently not sharing it with each other….
OK: Do you see such sharing happening in the near future?
VD: I mean, it depends on what we mean by “the near future”. I personally don’t make any plans that are longer than a year off.
The “near future” is very different whether one is sitting in Paris or New York. I don’t make those kinds of predictions because I’m out of a loop back-channel negotiations. Which are certainly taking place..,but we’re simply not there yet.
OKS: Both Netanyahu and Zelensky met with Trump at the end of July. What is anything has changed in the US approach to both wars and the relationship between these two leaders.
VD: Netanyahu shook hands with Zelensky at Senator Lindsey Graham’s funeral service after the two had not met in person for three years. The Israelis repeatedly stalled and dodged on commitments to arranging a formal meeting. The Americans have also asked the Israelis to stay out of this phase of the war and to let the Arab bloc handle – now aided by the Ukrainians sic! –much of what the IDF could or would be doing for diplomatic reasons. It is a bizarro reversal of the “normal” situation as the airspace over Israel is open and peaceful while that over the rest of the Middle East and Eastern Europe remains contested. Yet the Israelis continue to resist being told to stand down in Lebanon as part of the American trilateral negotiations with the Iranians and Pakistanis.
The Israeli file has become very divisive within American internal politics on both the left and the right. Something that we could discuss for hours, but needs to be dealt with shortly… Israel and Ukraine are also being more tightly linked by skeptics of American power and intervention. Some parts of the American MAGA right — but by no means all! — have taken an anti-Ukraine and anti-Israel stance. The polling shows us that the majority of American conservatives and Republicans still view Russia as a primary threat to national security.
There are of course Americans in the Democratic party who are against helping Israel in the war with Iran but at the same time are not opposed to helping Ukraine in the war with Russia as is the case in many parts of Western Europe. Whether one is in favor of Ukraine or Israel is almost a heuristics for one’s broader politics now in Europe and America.
There are also a small cohort of pro-Israel and anti-Ukraine on the American right — but their numbers have been dwindling since Russia publicly allied with Teheran and Trump changed course. The politics of that ideological shift lies beyond the scope of this interview. I will say however that it annoys me to no end when American “realists” or national conservatives make public declarations against the “neo-conservative efforts to meld the Iran and Ukraine wars”…. As if the two wars were not already totally part of the same front for three years! The Ukrainians have just hit an Iranian target for the first time… it took three years for them to respond to the endless Iranian attacks on Ukrainian territory… which is fairly patient by my standards! I am personally not a very patient man at all.
OKS: One of the main features of the joint US-Israeli operations against the Iranian regime is much of the Iranian opposition’s support for it, for regime change, for Israel and even for Ukraine. Israelis in turn are broadly positively inclined to the Iranian opposition and the Iranian people. What can you say about Ukrainians and the Russian opposition?
That is a very, very complex question. For the most part Ukrainians simply do not trust the Russian opposition — they refer to them mockingly as “good Russians”. Much of the ever squabbling Russian dissenters and opposition in London, Washington, Berlin and Paris have been very annoying. The reports of them sitting around expensive restaurants in the south of France arguing over who is the “real Russian” are entirely true. They have often taken positions which the Ukrainian population loathes such as claiming Crimea is Russian , not supporting offensive Ukrainian military aid, and insisting on the integrity of the Russian Federation in order to be able to be electorally competitive in post-Putin Russian politics. I have attended their conferences and their “Russian Constitutional Conventions” and they are too filled with infighting to be productive. The Russian opposition also lacks a constituency in Russia. Many of us don’t think they will have a role to play in future regime transition.
Some number of Russians have joined up with the Ukrainian army and have fought valiantly. On the other hand, the Ukrainian population sees most of the Russian population as being tacitly or totally in support of the war. The Ukrainian theory of victory is that until Russians feel more pain, they will not come out against the war.
OKS: Are you optimistic that Israel and Ukraine are going to win? And what do you say to those on the left who oppose both the Ukraine war and the war with Iran on humanitarian grounds, that it will just lead to death and the status quo, or worse a more violent Iran and Russia?
VD: A hundred percent. As a Ukrainian-Jew and an eternally positive American I am sure we’re going to destroy all of our enemies! The light will triumph over the darkness! I have overcome my Russian misanthropic fatalism. One has to be positive in order to win…
Still, if I were to turn off my macho Eastern European jocularity … it is obviously a very difficult situation. The world is trending more in the direction of chaos and war than stability and peace. Yet both Ukraine and Israel have shown that taking a stand and fighting makes a tremendous difference. In 2022 most of the world thought that the Russia would be able successfully annex Ukraine, or at least install a puppet government and rule from Moscow. That the Ukrainians stood up and fought with tremendous valor, grace, and excellence inspired the world’s reverence – such primal scenes had not been seen in Europe – or by Europeans — for 80 years at least.
Now, it is entirely obvious that the Ukrainian state will now survive this war. Though, what future borders, security arrangements, and society will look like remains opaque. Israel has likewise survived against all odds by skillful and creative and intense fighting….These are tremendous achievements. In both cases the price(s) that had to be paid was heavily compounded because of the decades of appeasement and irresponsible Western policy toward both Moscow and Tehran. I have not truck with those who justify appeasement or inaction on the grounds that war will make Russia and Iran more extreme and will just lead to more death and destruction. These states were always extreme and clear in their objectives. The two wars have severely weakened them and this is already a net gain for the world. Whether Putin and the IRGC will be replaced by better actors is still an open question.
But if we are to look at victory as more than simply a matter of national survival then as Zelensky said in the summer of 2023: “there is no happy ending to this story, we have already lost too many guys.” Tremendous damage has already been done. All the people dead. The millions of refugees. Many of whom simply won’t be returning home after having established lives in Europe or elsewhere. It is going to take another generation or two to rebuild, accumulate wealth, and bring people back — to get the birth rates back up. Isreal has fared much better but three years of continuous war have not been easy. Yet neither Zelensky nor the Ukrainian people have wavered. Netanyahu’s commitment and Israeli support for the war with Iran is also very high. This is and remains, as the Israelis like to point out, a war “of no choice” for either nation.