For years, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pursued what he called a “complex” relationship with the Kremlin, maintaining cordial relations with an increasingly isolated Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Even Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its warming relations with Israel’s arch rival, Iran, failed to upend the cooperation. The leaders kept in touch by phone, and Netanyahu announced a nonaligned approach to the war in Ukraine, refusing to purvey lethal aid or air-defense systems to Kyiv, despite Western pressure.
Now, after the deadly attack by Iranian-backed Hamas militants on Israel, the conversations appear to have ceased. Putin is one of the few major world leaders who hasn’t called Netanyahu to offer condolences for the more than 1,300 Israelis killed by Hamas in the attack.
“Putin and Netanyahu used to communicate frequently,” said Vera Michlin, a former official at Israel’s national-security council and now director of education at Sympodium, a U.K.-based think tank. “The current silence is definitely indicative of the wider Russian approach.”
The ending of entente between Russia and Israel highlights a larger tectonic shift under way in Russia’s role in the Middle East since Putin launched his war in Ukraine. Scrambling for arms and allies to execute its botched invasion of Ukraine, Russia has transformed its once-carefully-balanced relationship with Iran while strengthening ties with Arab states such as Egypt, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates.
Moscow is now seen as laying the foundation for a strategic relationship with the Islamic republic, which supplied thousands of suicide Shahed drones that Moscow used since the invasion of Ukraine to degrade and destroy its neighbor’s power infrastructure, and which is now providing components for Moscow to assemble the drones inside Russia. Russia, in turn, has delivered Yak-130 training aircraft to Iran’s air force and is considering a deal to sell Iran Su-35 jet fighters, which could shift the balance of air power in the Middle East.
For years, Russia and Iran fostered ties with one another, but relations were sown with distrust because each side also toyed with better relations with the West. Now both sides are pariahs to the West and backed into the same corner, analysts say.
“Russia is looking for a partner who can provide arms, but its embrace of Iran is driven also by a broader anti-Western sentiment,” said Nikolai Kozhanov, an expert on Russian-Iranian relations at Qatar University.
The embrace has extended to Iran-sponsored Hamas, which carried out the massacre on Israeli civilians. Over the past year, at least two high-level delegations have flown to Moscow for talks.
Over the weekend, Hamas wrote a message on its Telegram channel praising Putin’s position on the growing violence.
“We in the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) appreciate the position of Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding the ongoing Zionist aggression against our people and his rejection of the siege of Gaza,” the statement said.
Russia hasn’t denounced the attack by Hamas. Andrei Gurulev, State Duma deputy and member of its Defense Committee, noted the effectiveness of Hamas in overcoming Israeli defenses and wrote on his Telegram channel that Russian forces could learn from their methods and the Israeli response.
“Whose ally is Israel? The United States of America,” Mr. Gurulev wrote. “Whose ally is Iran and its surrounding Muslim world? Ours.”
Moscow’s closer ties with Iran, as well as its efforts to build stronger ties with Israel’s Arab neighbors, in many ways are a reprise of the Soviet Union’s Cold War stance toward Israel. At the time, the Soviet Union’s desire to upend U.S. partners and maintain footholds in the world’s poorer economies led it to arm Israel’s biggest enemies, leading to the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in six years later.
Russia supports a Palestinian state based on Israel’s 1967 border with a capital in East Jerusalem.
The Kremlin meanwhile has domestic reasons to welcome a war farther from Russia’s borders. With Russian presidential elections slated for March, the Kremlin has been looking for a diversion from the war in Ukraine. Putin has often sustained his 23-year rule over Russia using state-run media to ignore domestic problems while focusing on disarray abroad.
That has been a tougher act to follow with the military debacles in Ukraine, which the Kremlin had planned as a short military operation but which has drawn out into a yearslong war.
Since last weekend, Russia’s war in Ukraine has been forced off the front pages of newspapers around the world as well as inside Russia, where state-run media have pivoted from the war in Ukraine to Israel and Gaza.
Top Russian officials signal that they see other benefits in the months ahead, calling the outbreak of fighting a blow to U.S. prestige, and that Washington must now reassess just how much it can continue to supply Ukraine to fight off Russian troops while it also supplies Israel.
“This was the first, knee-jerk reaction that Russia had—this conflict is good for them, it takes pressure off of them in several ways,” said Michlin.
Putin, in his first comments on the attacks by Hamas earlier this past week, lashed out at the U.S., calling the attacks a “clear example of the failure of United States policy in the Middle East,” which has never defended the interests of Palestinians in peace talks. On Friday, he said Israel has a right to defend itself against attacks from Hamas but urged peace talks leading to the creation of an independent Palestinian state.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov likewise blamed the U.S. for monopolizing a failed peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Days after the massacre, he met with Arab League Chief Ahmed Aboul Gheit, and the two called for an immediate cease-fire and internationally backed talks.
“A large number of our compatriots live in Israel,” Lavrov said after the talks. “We are concerned about their fate in the current situation and are doing everything to find out if there are people among them who need help.”
Soon after the onset of fighting last weekend, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called it a comeuppance for the U.S. for spending its money and attention on undermining Russia, instead of brokering peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Moscow has roundly accused the U.S. of sparking its invasion of Ukraine by supporting and arming an anti-Russian Nazi regime in Kyiv.
“Instead of actively working on a Palestinian-Israeli settlement, these idiots came at us and started helping neo-Nazis in all kinds of ways, pushing our nations into conflict,” Medvedev wrote hours after Hamas launched its attack on Saturday.
Other prominent Kremlin commentators gloated that fighting in Israel means that now two U.S. allies could be denuded of defenses. The Kremlin propagandist and television presenter Vladimir Solovyov reposted a news article about the U.S. decision in January to remove 300,000 American 155-millimeter artillery shells from a weapons stockpile in Israel and transfer them to the Ukrainian military. The post said that Israel was now without an “insurance policy.”
State media likewise covered pro-Palestinian protests in London and New York, where shoving matches erupted with police.
Thomas Graham, a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Russian state media will likely pounce on any chaotic developments in Israel or elsewhere that will be a distraction to Russia’s internal problems.
Write to Alan Cullison at alan.cullison@wsj.com and Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com