PSCRP-BESA Reports No 226 (August 24, 2026)
Diplomatic Prelude
Since their restoration on the eve of the collapse of the USSR, one can conventionally divide relations between Russia and Israel into three main stages.
The first, covering Boris Yeltsin’s presidency in the 1990s and Vladimir Putin’s first term in the early 2000s, was characterized by rather restrained relations between the two countries. Although high-level political dialogue already existed at the time, the approach of the Israeli political establishment rarely extended beyond strengthening ties with Russian Jews and encouraging their repatriation to Israel, importing energy resources, and taking rather sluggish steps to provide diplomatic and legal support for the activities of Israeli businesspeople in the Russian market.
Visits to Russia by senior Israeli officials were highly irregular and sporadic at the time. They were intended either to urgently defuse a sudden crisis in bilateral relations (as, for example, during Netanyahu’s 1997 trip, when he attempted to derail the Russian-Iranian nuclear contract in a single stroke), or to present the Kremlin with yet another regional initiative that had already been agreed with the United States, the European Union, and the Arab states. Or simply to appear on Russian television channels broadcast in Israel ahead of yet another election in pursuit of Russian-speaking voters.
Within the framework of Russia’s Middle Eastern interests, the Israeli track also remained relatively peripheral for a long time, although bilateral trade and tourism gradually increased, joint industrial and commercial projects existed, and references to the “million compatriots living in Israel” became almost ritualistic. Another factor was the Kremlin’s understanding that Russia, unlike the USSR, could not stand in the region “on one Arab leg” alone and therefore sought, at least outwardly, to observe a principle of “balance of interests.”
The second stage, which coincided with Putin’s next two presidential terms and his tenure as prime minister, as well as with Russia’s “return” as one of the important players in the Middle East in the second half of the 2000s, saw a noticeable improvement in Russian-Israeli relations. Moving Israeli-Russian relations toward a close partnership was declared one of the foreign-policy priorities of Benjamin Netanyahu’s second government in 2009–2013. The same period also marked a significant strengthening of Russian-Israeli economic partnership. This included growth in bilateral trade, investment in real estate and finance, and joint projects in transportation, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, space, information technology, high tech, and other sectors.
There were also experiments with transfers of Israeli defense technologies—although this practice was discontinued in 2014 after Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. At various times, prospects for Russian participation in strategic Israeli infrastructure and energy programs, including the development of new gas fields, were discussed, though they ultimately came to nothing. Scientific, cultural, and other humanitarian ties also expanded, while tourism grew rapidly after the visa regime was abolished in 2008. Mutual visits at the highest, intergovernmental, and interparliamentary levels reflected, in the words of Russian political scientist Fyodor Lukyanov, the unusual situation in which Russia’s relations with Israel (with the exception of the Iranian issue) were better than with virtually the entire Arab world.
It is generally believed that the rapprochement between Moscow and Jerusalem was largely driven by the “special personal relationship” between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin, including the existence of a kind of “hotline” for direct communication between them, allowing misunderstandings and frictions to be resolved in real time. From his return to the post of prime minister in 2009 until he went into opposition in the summer of 2021, Netanyahu met Putin around two dozen times—roughly twice as often as he met with the presidents of the United States, Israel’s closest partner and ally. In reality, this was less a matter of friendship than of mutual trust between two politicians who respected one another. In a sense, in the eyes of the Russian president, Netanyahu symbolized Israel as a powerful regional superpower capable of withstanding external pressure while possessing a strong lobby in America. Bibi, for his part, clearly regarded his relationship with the Russian leader as an important resource not only in foreign policy but, to a considerable extent, in domestic politics as well.
Even then, however, some members of Israel’s elite and broader society expressed concern that Russia, as the successor to the USSR, which had led the anti-Western camp during the Cold War, was by definition a power whose fundamental interests would sooner or later come into conflict with those of Israel. This was particularly so because the Kremlin’s Middle East policy, in some respects, also catered to growing anti-American sentiment in Russian public opinion. But there was another view as well: that Russian-Israeli relations had failed to reach the level of a strategic partnership not because of insurmountable “civilizational and political contradictions,” but simply because Israeli and Russian interests in the region did not always coincide. Accordingly, it made sense to develop relations with Moscow in areas of mutual interest while keeping outside the scope of those relations the issues on which Israel and Russia had “agreed to disagree.”
In any case, at that stage the relationship was better described as a tactical partnership based on overlapping interests and agreements to observe rules of the game acceptable to both sides. Overall, it was clear that if the vector changed, the interests would change as well.
Two Wars and a New Format of Relations
This assessment was fully borne out during the current, third stage of interstate relations, whose formal and substantive beginning was Russia’s full-scale military invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. It makes sense to distinguish two sub-stages—before and after October 7, 2023, when militants from Hamas, the terrorist organization controlling the Gaza Strip, carried out a brutal massacre of residents of Israeli communities near the border. Israel responded to this aggression with the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) counterterrorism operation “Swords of Iron,” which became the prelude to the current major Middle Eastern war between Israel and its allies, on the one hand, and Iran and its radical Islamist proxies, on the other.
In the years since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, virtually every major dimension of Israeli-Russian relations—political and diplomatic partnership, civil and cultural contacts, and economic cooperation—has undergone an evident decline.
Israel immediately condemned the Russian invasion, has provided and continues to provide Ukraine with substantial humanitarian and material assistance, diplomatic and political support, and has supplied the Ukrainian Armed Forces with protective equipment and certain types of defensive, non-lethal weapons (as well as some other items not publicly disclosed). However, unlike NATO member states, which had previously provided Ukraine with security guarantees, Israel, contrary to Kyiv’s expectations, did not directly join the bloc of Western countries confronting Russia.
The Israeli leadership, concerned with ensuring the security of the Jewish state amid the clearly growing threat posed by Iran and its regional satellites, apparently continued by inertia to assume that the Russian-Israeli understandings and mechanisms developed in previous years had not lost their relevance. At first glance, this position by Jerusalem also initially seemed officially acceptable to Moscow. Gradually, however, the latter began to display increasing irritation as voices in Israel grew louder in arguing that, in light of Russia’s strategic rapprochement with Iran, the previous paradigm of relations with Moscow had run its course.
Many expected a change of direction on the Jerusalem-Moscow track after Benjamin Netanyahu returned to the Israeli prime minister’s office in November 2022. Such hopes (or fears) were based on the fact that, while in opposition from July 2021 to December 2022, Netanyahu sharply criticized then-prime minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, who succeeded Bennett as prime minister in July 2022. Netanyahu claimed that Lapid, by supporting Ukraine and condemning Russian aggression, had allegedly destroyed the “balanced, measured, and responsible relationship with Russia that had been built over years” and endangered “interests vital to Israel.” These included, according to Netanyahu, the “coordination between the IDF and the Russian military in the security sphere over Syrian airspace” that he himself had achieved and that, in his view, constituted a “cornerstone of Israel’s national security.” However, after Netanyahu’s Likud party and its allies returned to power, no substantial changes occurred in relations between Israel and Russia. Nevertheless, for some time both sides continued trying to maintain the appearance of “business as usual.”
After October 7, this became considerably more difficult. Russia almost openly supported Hamas as an Iranian satellite, as demonstrated by a long list of moves by official Moscow: from receiving members of the terrorist organization’s leadership at the official level and accusing Israel of “war crimes” to high-profile anti-Israeli diplomatic steps and Russian economic assistance to “Hamasstan.” This was accompanied by the pronounced anti-Israeli line adopted by Russia’s state-controlled media.
Russia’s support for the Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank, whose leaders sided with Moscow from the very beginning of Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine, fits into the same pattern. In return, Moscow continues to repeat the mantra that the creation of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital is the key to resolving the Middle East conflict—even though the relevance of this idea has long been in doubt.
Still, although some in Israel acknowledge that pro-Palestinian, including pro-Hamas, narratives frequently voiced in Moscow at the governmental level and in the media fuel anti-Israeli sentiment in the region, the assumption of Russia’s direct involvement in the current war appeared doubtful. Far more obvious were the benefits the Kremlin might hope to gain from the new situation. These included the propaganda effect of portraying the outbreak of Israel’s war with “Hamasstan” as a failure of American diplomacy, and the slowdown of Saudi-Israeli normalization, which would effectively have brought the century-old Arab-Israeli conflict in its classical forms to an end. Another potential gain was the disruption of a possible defense alliance involving the United States, Israel, and pro-American Arab regimes (a “Middle Eastern NATO”), which would have posed a serious challenge to the interests of Russia, Iran, and China in the region.
In the broadest sense, Moscow’s regional geostrategic vision still appears to fit the normative framework characteristic of a substantial and influential segment of Russia’s foreign-policy elite: Iran is Russia’s strategic partner in the region. Accordingly, the survival of Iranian proxies such as Hamas, which in Russia is regarded as an organization with which it is acceptable to engage, corresponds to Russia’s Middle East agenda—unlike the interests of Israel, a strategic ally of Russia’s adversary, the United States.
There is no doubt that the current war between the United States, Israel, and their allies, on the one hand, and Iran and its terrorist proxies, on the other, is affecting other regional conflicts, including the Russian-Ukrainian war. As expected, the reactions of the leaders of these two opposing states were diametrically opposed. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky issued an official statement supporting the military strike against the ayatollahs’ regime, while Moscow, equally predictably, condemned the attack.
History, Politics and People-to-People
Among the achievements of the brief Russian-Israeli “honeymoon” of the latter half of the 2000s and the 2010s was the development of a shared narrative framework regarding World War II, including criticism of attempts to revise its outcome and of Holocaust denial. In 2018, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was one of only two foreign leaders—the other being Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić—who joined Vladimir Putin at the military parade in Moscow commemorating the 73rd anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War. Netanyahu also made a symbolic gesture at the time that generated considerable discussion in Israel and internationally: he took part in the “Immortal Regiment” march, a commemorative initiative launched by Russian civil society that soon became part of the state’s official ideological narrative.
However, the information and propaganda campaign accompanying Russia’s war against Ukraine—one prominent component of which is the Russian side’s characterization of supporters of Ukrainian independence as “Banderites” (radical nationalists) and fascist accomplices of Hitler—has led to a sharp erosion of the previous understandings between Moscow and Jerusalem. For the same purpose, the Kremlin also actively manipulates the concepts of genocide and the Holocaust, using them as tools to accomplish a range of objectives related to delegitimizing the Ukrainian leadership. Ukraine, in turn, where many leaders are of Jewish origin, has advanced the thesis of “Russian aggression as a new Holocaust,” widely used to influence international public opinion and draw Israel into the confrontation. As long as the war continues, a restoration of the previous shared narratives in this area does not appear likely.
Economy and Trade
Available data show that economic relations—trade, investment, and other business activity—between the two countries are substantially weaker today than they were half a decade ago. Israel did not join the sanctions packages imposed by Western countries on the Russian economy, but neither did it make efforts to circumvent them. Understandably, Israeli state-owned and private companies, in addition to moral considerations for those guided by them, have had to take into account the possibility of secondary sanctions from the EU and, especially, the United States.
One result, in particular, was a noticeable decline in Israeli exports to Russia in 2022 (around $640 million) compared with the previous year (approximately $720 million). In the following year, 2023, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics recorded a modest 2% increase, but in the first half of 2024 Israeli exports to Russia again fell by one-third, from $310 million to $218 million, while Israeli exports to Ukraine tripled in the same year. Imports from Russia to Israel also declined by 20%, from $103 million to $83 million.
Overall, according to Bloomberg, although the volume of bilateral trade fluctuated that year, it reached $3.86 billion. Israeli exports consisted mainly of agricultural products, fruit and vegetables, as well as certain optical instruments, and totaled $489.96 million. Russian exports to Israel in 2024 amounted to $2.37 billion and were distributed fairly evenly among oil, grain, and construction materials; in the following year, 2025, the figure remained virtually unchanged at $2.36 billion.
Another factor has been the tariff policy of the U.S. administration. Thus, in early 2026 it became known that, in an effort to persuade Washington to ease tariffs on Israeli exports, the Israeli government intended to impose a 50% tax on feed wheat from all countries except the United States. If this decision is implemented despite protests from Israel’s agricultural lobby, Russia will be the most adversely affected party, having supplied 60% of Israel’s total wheat imports in 2025.
Among projects of this kind, one may mention the opening of the first hotel in Israel by the Russian hotel chain Azimut Hotels, owned by Russian-Jewish businessman Alexander Klyachin. This was announced on Monday, June 8. The new hotel complex is located in central Jerusalem on Shamai Street, near the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall. Investment in the project exceeded 150 million shekels.
Outwardly, Russian-Israeli relations today represent a combination of tactical clashes of interests on one level and fundamental uncertainty on another. As a participant in a discussion at the Moscow Chamber of Commerce and Industry told the author, the current leitmotif of Russian-Israeli business contacts can be summed up as follows: “This is a tactical pause for now, but we are prepared and looking to the future with optimism.” A similar narrative prevails among Russian experts and officials involved in business.
Future Prospects
It can be concluded that, overall, there has been no definitive rupture in ties between Jerusalem and Moscow. The Russian leadership continues to condemn the actions of Israel and the United States in their current war with Iran and their policies toward Iranian satellites, but at the same time generally avoids steps that could lead to irreversible escalation in relations with Washington and Jerusalem. It appears that, for the time being at least, Russia does not wish to see Israel among its overt enemies. This does not, however, prevent certain members of the Russian political establishment, and especially pro-Kremlin media circles, from participating in anti-Israeli propaganda campaigns; it is difficult to doubt that such campaigns have been sanctioned at a sufficiently high level.
As for the Israeli government, it continues, to one degree or another, to maintain with Moscow the appearance of “business as usual,” although the “special relationship” between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Vladimir Putin, forged at the height of the Israeli-Russian “honeymoon” in the second decade of this century, has clearly become a thing of the past. It is possible that the current Israeli leadership’s policy toward Moscow will also take into account the approach of the Donald Trump administration, which does not regard Russia’s presumed support for Iran as a major problem. And, as some observers believe, it is prepared to ease anti-Russian sanctions as part of a worldview rooted in the 1980s—one that is not particularly realistic in the present circumstances and may even be destructive and risky, especially for the Middle East: friendship with Moscow combined with confrontation with Tehran, skepticism about NATO’s authority, and the use of tariffs.
On the other hand, certain developments that have become public knowledge may lead to adjustments in this approach. In addition to Russia’s supply of drones to Iran, attention was drawn to information obtained by The Jerusalem Post, according to which Russian intelligence provided Iran with a detailed list of 55 sites belonging to Israel’s critical energy infrastructure, potentially enabling Iran to carry out precision missile strikes capable, in principle, of paralyzing the country’s national energy system.
It is difficult to say whether developments of this kind, should they recur, will become a “red line” requiring the Israeli leadership to abandon its traditional “balance of interests” and substantially reassess relations with the Russian Federation. For now, what is visible are isolated cases such as the coordination in April of this year between Russian diplomats and the Israel Defense Forces over the evacuation of around two hundred employees of Russia’s state atomic energy company working at the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant following Israeli-American strikes in the area.
At the same time, the real “red lines” remain fairly clear and can be reduced to a simple formula: Israel does not participate directly in the war in Ukraine and does not provide it with large-scale military assistance, while Russia does not intervene in the Middle Eastern conflict on Iran’s side and does not directly assist the development of Iran’s nuclear program.
It should be assumed that the principal dialogue between Jerusalem and Moscow takes place behind the scenes, and for now its substance can only be guessed at.