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Saturday, March 18, 2023

Ukraine events and developments, and contentions, not getting much US mainstream media attention.

Roughly in reverse chrono order - yesterday - RT online:

Israel explains reluctance to arm Ukraine -
The nation has found itself “in a complex situation” as it has an agreement with Russia over Syria, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said

Speaking at a joint press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin, Netanyahu was asked whether Israel would continue to refrain from sending arms to Kiev. The prime minister admitted that when it comes to this issue, Israel had found itself “in a complex situation.” 

“Israeli pilots and Russian pilots are flying within spitting distance of each other over the skies of Syria,” he said, adding that several years ago he had decided to stop Iran, Israel’s arch enemy, from creating a “third front” against the Jewish state on its northern border.

Israel has repeatedly warned Syria against sheltering Hezbollah militia members, an organization it has designated as terrorist and deems to be linked to Iran. Syrian officials have on numerous occasions accused Israel of conducting deadly strikes on the nation’s territory.“To prevent that [the third front], we used air power… To do that, we had an arrangement struck with the Russian government and with the Russian Air Force, and the Russian Army in Syria that we do not shoot down each other’s planes,” he noted, adding that no other European country supporting Ukraine had similar circumstance in its relations with Moscow. 

That explains an otherwise curious visit between Bennett, then Israeli Prime Minister, with Putin in Moscow, early after Russian troops entered Ukraine (reported then by The Hill, and Jewish News Syndicate). With an understanding formed earlier but existing between the two nations re Syria, reaffirmation of things made sense.

Next item, Crabgrass is uncertain if it was covered at all by major US media, (readers are urged to research the question if interested), Insider reported Feb. 7, an interesting story -

A former Israeli prime minister is walking back his suggestion that the United States may have "blocked" an agreement last year to end the war in Ukraine, a claim that had been amplified by Russian state media and Kremlin sympathizers in the West.

In a sprawling, five-hour interview posted to his YouTube channel over the weekend, Naftali Bennett — Israel's prime minister at the time Russia invaded Ukraine — discussed his efforts to negotiate a ceasefire, claiming he had extracted a pledge from Russian President Vladimir Putin to not assassinate his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

After the interview was posted, Sputnik, a Russian state media outlet, claimed it was evidence that the US and its allies had "halted efforts to put an end to the Russia-Ukraine crisis." On social media, pundits sympathetic to the Russian position likewise asserted that the interview was evidence that a pro-war establishment in the West was to blame for the continued bloodshed in Ukraine.

"Bombshell: Former Israeli prime minister says that Western leaders blocked #Ukraine & #Russia peace deal," Ivan Katchanovski, a Canadian political science professor, wrote on Twitter. The post from Katchanovski — who has claimed that the 2014 sniper attacks on protesters in Ukraine were a "false flag" operation intended to frame its former pro-Russia government — attracted the attention of Twitter's CEO, Elon Musk, who responded: "??"

"I was told something very similar," Jordan Peterson, a right-wing Canadian influencer, chimed in.

But a reader note appended to Katchanovski's post by Twitter itself highlights some of the missing context: that there was no actual deal to block — and Bennett himself wasn't sure that one would have been desirable, anyway.

The commentary also omitted Bennett's explanation for the ultimate failure to strike a peace agreement: the massacre of civilians in Bucha, Ukraine, which is being investigated as an apparent war crime that led Kyiv to break off talks.

The full story

As recounted in the interview, Bennett visited Russia a few months before the war, where he then relayed to Putin a request from Zelenskyy to meet. "They're Nazis, they're warmongers, I won't meet him," Putin responded, in Bennett's telling.

After the war began in February 2022, Bennett said he tried again to work as an intermediary between Putin and Zelensky, acknowledging that his primary interest was his own country's security.

"The war breaks out, and I'm instantly between a rock and a hard place," Bennett recounted. The Americans, he said, expected "that we all rally for Ukraine." But in Syria, a Russian ally, Israel conducts regular airstrikes with the Kremlin's support. "Once or twice a week, we attack the Iranian presence in Syria, and Russia, the superpower, has the S-300 [air defense system] there, and if they press the button, Israeli pilots will fall."

Bennett, who left office in June 2022, was also concerned about the fate of Jews in Russia and Ukraine, he said.

In the weeks following the invasion, Bennett said he spoke with both Putin and Zelenskyy, and even made a secret trip to Moscow, in an effort to negotiate an end to the conflict. At the time, Zelenskyy himself noted that the Israeli prime minister was "trying to find a way of holding talks," a fact for which "we are grateful."

All Crabgrass knows is from what is posted online. No accord was reached in the early days. How and why are questions where much fact remains and doubtlessly will remain classified.