When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy briefly spoke to each other at the funeral of Sen. Lindsey Graham on Tuesday, ahead of their separate meetings with President Donald Trump, the conversation was reportedly cordial. The men smiled and shook hands. The last time they had met in person was three years ago. No other meeting was arranged during their U.S. stay. According to an unnamed Israeli official, the two leaders spoke about drone technology: “We both share an issue, and that is drones.” Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar echoed this comment after his own conversation with his Ukrainian counterpart: “We discussed the challenges facing our nations, including the threat posed by Iran.” Three days earlier, Ukraine had sunk an Iranian ship in the Caspian Sea.
So why the tepidness, then, despite this shared interest? The short answer is Israel’s delicate balancing act with Russia.
The mass immigration of post-Soviet Jews in the 1990s created a significant Russian-speaking electorate in Israel. Its votes were spread between several parties; its most explicit political vehicle was Natan Sharansky’s Yisrael BaAliyah, and, a few years later, the more nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu, founded by Avigdor Lieberman in 1999. Still, by the end of the decade, the new base had become capable of influencing roughly 15 seats in the Knesset. But the weight of this new constituency was not merely electoral. The post-Soviet immigration wave brought tens of thousands of engineers, scientists, physicians, and other highly trained professionals into an economy just beginning its transformation into a technology power. Tens of thousands of Soviet-trained engineers and technologists arrived during the 1990s, more than doubling Israel’s existing engineering workforce, even if many initially struggled to find work commensurate with their qualifications.
In the decades that followed, Jewish post-Soviet oligarchs, including Vladimir Gusinsky, Leonid Nevzlin, Mikhail Fridman, and Roman Abramovich, deepened those connections through residence, investment, philanthropy, and involvement in Israeli public life. The Soviet collapse had therefore tied Israel to the Russian-speaking world through votes, skills, capital, and personal networks before Vladimir Putin ever entered the Kremlin.
When Ariel Sharon became foreign minister in 1998, he treated that demographic transformation as a potential instrument of foreign policy: Israel’s large Russian-speaking population gave it a natural constituency for closer relations with Moscow. Sharon began advocating warmer ties before Putin had fully consolidated power. After becoming prime minister, Sharon visited Putin in Moscow in September 2001, where the two leaders emphasized a shared struggle against Islamic terrorism during the heights of the Second Intifada and the Second Chechen War.
The Iran wars of 2025 and 2026 became a controlled experiment in what the relationship was worth to each side once little structural support remained.
The relationship crested under Benjamin Netanyahu, whose personal rapport with Putin was less one of friendship than of mutual professional respect between two men who intended to stay in power for a long time. Between Netanyahu’s 2009 return to office and his 2021 ouster, he met with Putin roughly 20 times, about twice as often as he met with any U.S. president, Israel’s most important ally.
The load-bearing structure underneath it all was Syria. When Russian forces entered the Syrian Civil War in 2015 to save the nearly toppled Assad regime, Moscow and Jerusalem quietly built a deconfliction line between their militaries: Russia would not interfere with Israeli strikes on Iranian and Hezbollah targets, and Israel would not treat Russian assets as fair game. “We don’t interfere with them and they don’t interfere with us,” as former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon put it. It held for the better part of a decade, surviving the accidental 2018 downing of a Russian aircraft by Syrian air defenses and years of routine Israeli airstrikes.
But it wasn’t Netanyahu’s rapport alone. His foreign minister and later defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, the Moldovan-born, Russian-speaking leader of Yisrael Beiteinu, pursued a Russia policy that was often warmer than Netanyahu’s. In 2011, he called Russia’s parliamentary elections “fair, free and democratic,” even as then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and international observers raised concerns about manipulation and ballot-box stuffing in favor of Putin’s party, United Russia. After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Israel conspicuously failed to participate in the U.N. General Assembly vote affirming Ukraine’s territorial integrity and declaring the Crimean referendum invalid, an absence officially attributed to a strike by Israeli diplomats, but one that nonetheless spared Moscow an Israeli vote against it.
The two men were also, at times, competing for the same Russian-speaking constituency rather than working in tandem. In September 2019, days before an Israeli election, Lieberman mocked Netanyahu after reports emerged of Putin keeping him waiting for nearly three hours in Sochi. “In Russia, nothing is by happenstance,” he said. “Everything there is planned to the smallest detail.” He called Netanyahu’s visit “purely electoral,” suggesting the trip was a waste of government funds and an attempt to peel Russian-speaking voters away from Yisrael Beiteinu.
Alongside the military arrangement, Putin built a warmer register than pure realpolitik required. He often called Israel “a Russian-speaking state” and even told a Moscow audience in 2019 that “citizens of Russia and Israel are connected by ties of family, kinship and friendship. … Our nations are united by common and often tragic pages in history.” During a 2005 visit to Israel, Putin also reunited with his former German teacher, Mina Yuditskaya-Berliner, a Jewish émigré living in Tel Aviv, and arranged for her to receive an apartment there, although later financial records showed that Roman Abramovich had supplied the purchase money. In 2012, he personally donated to and visited Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, a $50 million monument to Jewish life in Russia built with Chabad, and told its founding rabbi that its opening was “another step in quelling antisemitism in Russia.” At the museum’s opening, Shimon Peres praised Putin as a leader who “knows how to fight evil,” a judgment that would age with extraordinary irony.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 should have forced a reckoning in Jerusalem. It never fully did, and the reasons revealed how transactional the Israeli-Russian relationship had remained. Israel condemned the invasion and, unlike after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, voted for the U.N. General Assembly resolution demanding that Moscow withdraw its forces. It supplied Ukraine with humanitarian aid and nonlethal protective equipment but resisted President Zelenskyy’s repeated appeals for weapons and air-defense systems. The policy was controversial at home: Israeli public opinion strongly favored Ukraine, and thousands of Israelis, many of them with roots in Ukraine, protested what they regarded as Jerusalem’s inadequate response, although the public remained divided over supplying weapons.
At first, Israel’s ambiguous position appeared to offer diplomatic leverage. On March 5, 2022, then Prime Minister Naftali Bennett flew secretly to Moscow to meet with Putin, then traveled to Berlin to brief German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Bennett had spoken with Zelenskyy beforehand and, over the following weeks, repeatedly communicated with both the Russian and Ukrainian leaders, carrying messages between them rather than presenting a formal Israeli peace plan.
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His shuttle diplomacy overlapped with, but remained distinct from, the direct Russian-Ukrainian negotiations that began in Belarus, continued remotely, and culminated in talks under Turkish auspices in Istanbul. Bennett subsequently claimed that Putin had assured him he would not kill Zelenskyy and that Zelenskyy had shown a willingness to abandon Ukraine’s bid for NATO membership. He also suggested that the Western governments supporting Ukraine had preferred continued military pressure to the cease-fire he was attempting to broker, a remark later cited by those who accused Washington and London of blocking peace. But Bennett later qualified the stronger interpretation of his remarks: It remained uncertain whether an agreement was attainable or even desirable, and he said he had estimated the initiative’s chances of success at roughly 50-50. Contemporaneous Israeli and Ukrainian officials likewise stressed that no completed deal had been presented for Kyiv to accept, while the subsequent negotiations left major territorial, military, and security-guarantee questions unresolved.
Whether Bennett came as close to a breakthrough as he later implied remains disputed. What the episode demonstrated more clearly was the practical value Israel still derived from preserving access to Moscow. At the war’s outset, it was one of the few Western-aligned states whose prime minister could meet Putin in person, speak repeatedly with Zelenskyy, and plausibly present himself to both as an intermediary.
That access also imposed limits. Netanyahu later argued that Israeli weapons sent to Ukraine could be captured by Russian forces and transferred to Iran, allowing Tehran to study or reverse-engineer sensitive Israeli technology. In May 2022, Israel rejected an American request to permit Germany to transfer Israeli-licensed Spike antitank missiles to Ukraine. It also resisted proposals to send Kyiv U.S.-owned Iron Dome batteries.
Beneath these explanations lay the continuing constraint of Syria. Israeli officials feared that antagonizing Moscow could jeopardize the coordination mechanism that allowed the Israel Defense Forces to strike Iranian and Hezbollah targets without confronting Russian forces. Refusing to arm Ukraine was therefore not simply an expression of neutrality. It was the price Jerusalem believed it had to pay to preserve freedom of action closer to home.
Yet the Ukraine war was already eroding the logic behind that restraint. By the summer of 2022, after failing to achieve a rapid victory and expending large quantities of precision-guided weaponry, Moscow had turned to Tehran for attack drones. Russian officials visited an Iranian airfield twice to inspect weapons-capable systems; deliveries followed, and Iranian-designed Shaheds soon became a central component of Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure. Iran, one of the powers Russia had previously attempted to balance in Syria, was becoming an increasingly important supplier to the Russian war effort.
At roughly the same time, Moscow began withdrawing or repositioning some personnel and equipment from Syria to meet the demands of the Ukraine front. In August 2022, satellite imagery indicated that Russia had removed an S-300 air-defense battery from Syria and shipped it toward the Black Sea, apparently to reinforce defenses closer to the Ukrainian theater. Russia did not abandon its principal Syrian bases, but reports of withdrawals and repositioning suggested that Iran and Hezbollah were seeking to fill some of the resulting gaps. The contradiction was becoming difficult to ignore: Israel was preserving its accommodation with Moscow partly because Russia could restrain Iran in Syria, even as Russia’s battlefield failures made it more dependent on Iranian weapons and less capable of performing that restraining role.
The community most exposed by this ambiguity was not in Jerusalem. When the invasion began, Russia’s core Jewish community still numbered roughly 155,000 people, along with a much larger population estimated at around 600,000 eligible for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. Three days after the invasion, Boruch Gorin, a senior spokesman for Russia’s Chabad-affiliated Federation of Jewish Communities, wrote bluntly on Facebook, “Stop the war!” On March 2, Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar—nicknamed “Putin’s Rabbi,” given their close relationship—issued his own carefully worded appeal to “stop this madness to prevent future deaths.” Their statements were striking because Putin had spent two decades cultivating a tacit compact with Chabad: After 70 years in which the Soviet state had repressed religious life and sharply constrained Jewish practice, the Kremlin supported the rebuilding of Jewish institutions, while Chabad’s leaders generally avoided confronting the government.
By the summer of 2022, Moscow was pressuring the institutions connecting Russian Jews to Israel. Russia’s Justice Ministry asked a Moscow court to dissolve the Russian branch of the Jewish Agency, the organization responsible for facilitating aliyah. The case was formally framed around alleged violations of Russian privacy law, but it unfolded amid deteriorating relations with Israel and a growing exodus of Russian citizens. By July, nearly 20,000 immigrants had arrived in Israel from Russia since the invasion began, with similar numbers arriving from Ukraine. Then Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid initially warned that closing the agency would be “a grave event” with consequences for bilateral relations, then softened his language, emphasizing Israel’s readiness for dialogue while “maintaining the important relations between the countries.”
The same community Putin had long presented as evidence of his tolerance could now serve as leverage against Israel. In October, Alexei Pavlov, an assistant secretary of Russia’s Security Council, described Chabad as a supremacist cult in the state-owned newspaper Argumenty i Fakty. Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev subsequently apologized, saying the remarks were erroneous, and stressed that they did not represent the council’s official position. Even so, the episode alarmed Russian Jewish leaders: Former Moscow chief rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt urged Jews who were able to leave Russia to do so, while Boruch Gorin warned that official antisemitism would mean “the end of a Jewish presence in Russia.”
Putin’s own rhetoric was shifting as well. At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2023, he defended Russia’s absurd claim that it was fighting to “denazify” Ukraine by turning directly to Zelenskyy’s Jewish identity. “I have a lot of Jewish friends,” Putin said. “They say that Zelenskyy is not Jewish, that he is a disgrace to the Jewish people.” Putin, who had spent two decades presenting himself as a protector of Russian Jews and a guardian of Holocaust memory, was now claiming the authority to distinguish authentic Jews from shameful ones and conscripting Jewish suffering into the ideological justification for his war.
After Oct. 7, the deterioration became even harder to disguise. Moscow blamed the conflict’s eruption largely on the failure of American policy and intensified its criticism of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, while Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the bombardment violated international law and risked producing a catastrophe lasting decades. Less than three weeks after the massacre, Russia hosted a Hamas delegation led by senior official Moussa Abu Marzouk in Moscow, prompting an angry Israeli protest that the Kremlin was sending “a message legitimizing terrorism against Israelis.”
Days later, an antisemitic mob stormed the airport in Russia’s Makhachkala, Dagestan, searching for rumored Jewish and Israeli passengers arriving on a flight from Tel Aviv. Hundreds of men overran the terminal and runway, inspecting vehicles and demanding to see passengers’ documents. Putin condemned the violence only indirectly, blaming Ukrainian agents acting on behalf of Western intelligence services, without presenting evidence, rather than confronting the antisemitism animating the riot. The Kremlin did not organize the mob, and Russian authorities later prosecuted participants; by July 2025, Russian courts had sentenced 135 people in connection with the riot. But the episode exposed how quickly official anti-Western and anti-Israeli narratives could merge with older hatreds inside Russia itself.
By then, well over 40,000 Russian citizens eligible under the Law of Return had immigrated to Israel. Those who remained belonged to a community Moscow and Jerusalem had spent two decades treating as a strategic asset: evidence of Putin’s professed tolerance, and an electoral and demographic constituency in Israel.
However, the rupture did not happen. Israel preserved its access to Russia, while Moscow stopped short of severing relations with Jerusalem. But beneath that continuity, the arrangement was decaying. Russia was becoming more dependent on Iran, less capable of regulating Syria, more willing to pressure Jewish institutions, and increasingly prepared to align itself diplomatically and rhetorically against Israel. The relationship survived Ukraine and Oct. 7. The strategic logic that had sustained it did not.
Bashar al-Assad’s downfall in December 2024 removed much of the physical premise on which the relationship had been built. Russia sharply reduced its military presence and faced an uncertain future at its principal Syrian bases, losing much of the leverage it had exercised under Assad, even as it sought to retain access to Tartus and Hmeimim. Israel, freed from the same need to coordinate around a large and entrenched Russian deployment, moved into the Golan buffer zone for the first time since the 1974 disengagement agreement. The deconfliction arrangement that had structured a decade of Israeli-Russian contact had largely lost its operational purpose. The relationship was now held together by habit, a shared distaste for surprises, and neither government’s desire to be the one to end it formally.
The Iran wars of 2025 and 2026 became, in effect, a controlled experiment in what the relationship was worth to each side once little structural support remained. In June 2025, when Israel struck Iranian nuclear and military targets, Putin condemned the attacks as illegal and offered to mediate but provided no publicly visible military assistance to Tehran, and he called Netanyahu personally to discuss the crisis. Contemporary reporting described Moscow’s response as rhetorically forceful but materially limited.
In February 2026, when the United States and Israel launched a far larger war and killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Putin’s language sharpened considerably, calling the killing a “cynical” murder carried out “in violation of all norms of human morality and international law.” But the basic pattern held: strong words, sustained diplomatic support for Iran and demands for an immediate cessation of hostilities, but no publicly announced deployment of Russian troops or major weapons transfers. Netanyahu, for his part, had told the Knesset months earlier that he still spoke with Putin “on a regular basis” and that their long-standing personal relationship “serves our vital interests.”
Iran had already confirmed its purchase of Russian Su-35 fighter jets in 2025. Now, unconfirmed reports indicate that Russia has completed an initial batch of up to 20 aircraft. If shipped, the transfer would represent a different order of military commitment from the drone cooperation that defined the wartime years, and perhaps would be the clearest signal yet that a Russia battered by its war in Ukraine is leaning harder into one of its remaining strategic partnerships rather than retreating from it.
Whether a cornered Moscow ultimately becomes more dependent on Tehran, and thus a subtler but more durable threat to Israel, or simply runs out of the capacity to make good on that dependence is now genuinely an open question, one this year’s fighting has done more to sharpen than to answer.
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Ukrainian soldiers drive in a military truck along a road in the Kharkiv region [File: AFP]
Ukrainian servicemen prepare to fire a 152mm howitzer 2A65 Msta-B towards Russian troops near the front-line town of Dobropillia, in the Donetsk region [File: Anatolii Stepanov/Reuters]
In Lviv, a woman visits the grave of her father, a Ukrainian soldier who died on the front line. More than 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed on the battlefield, according to President Zelenskyy [File: Nils Adler/Al Jazeera]