By Uriel Araujo
Russian national “outside the list” released from Hamas a diplomatic win for Moscow
On November 26, 2023, Ron Olegovich Krivoy, a Russian national held as a hostage by Hamas was released, together with fourteen Israeli, and three Thai nationals. The latter were set free as part of an Iranian-Thai agreement. All of them were handed to the Red Cross. Krivoy’s release, reportedly a sign of good will towards Russia, is remarkable and can be described as a diplomatic achievement by the Kremlin because the 25-year-old was not part of the list Hamas had agreed with Israel.
Krivoy was working as a sound engineer at a rave music festival in the Israeli kibbutz Reim, wich was attacked by the Palestinian political movement. Such an attack was part of the so-called Al-Aqsa Flood Operation launched by the military wing of the movement, which subjected Israel to an unprecedented series of rocket attacks from the Hamas-controlled Gaza strip. The action, which was internationally condemned, resulted in the death of over a thousand people, including military and civilian, although numbers and responsibility are still being disputed.
In response, Israel launched its Operation Iron Sword, and started conducting air strikes, targeting also civilian infrastructure, residential buildings, hospitals etc. This was also unprecedented in scale and Israel’s ongoing military campaign is facing global criticism and even being denounced as an attempt at ethnic cleansing or genocide, as Tel Aviv announced a full blockade of Gaza, which stopped supplies of food, water, medical items, and energy. The death toll so far has exceed 14 thousand people, with over 36 thousand injured.
Over 240 hostages were captured by the Islamic group on October 7, and started being freed after a Qatar-brokered agreement struck between Israel and Hamas, the first large-scale deal since October 7. It involved exchanging hostages and detainees held by both the Jewish state and Hamas, and it resulted in a four-day truce starting on November 24. The truce is to continue as long as the Palestinian organization keeps releasing ten hostages daily and around a hundred have been set free thus far. However, Israel has just announced it has resumed its combat operations in Gaza allegedly because Hamas failed to provide a list of hostages’ names demanded by Tel Aviv for extending the cease-fire. The consequences of this remain to be seen.
Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been going on for decades since the 1947 UN resolution determined the creation of both a Jewish and a Palestinian state. Only after the 1993 Oslo I Accord between Israel and the Palestinian Authority did the two actors conditionally recognize each other’s right to exercise government in specific parts of the Holy Land (as the region is often called by Jews, Christians, and Muslims). However, Israeli History and Geography text books routinely treat “Jewish control and the Palestinian’s inferior position as almost natural and self-evident”, according to a 2020 study by Avner Ben-Amos, a Tel Aviv University professor.
The State of Palestine however faces internal divisions, with Gaza today also being a disputed area in an ongoing intra-Palestine conflict between the Islamic group Hamas and the secular Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority. The former exercises de facto administration in Gaza while the latter controls the West Bank.
Israel routinely compares Hamas to the terrorist group ISIS, also known as Daesh or Islamic State. However upon engaging in negotiations with the combatant group, it has implicitly recognized it as a legitimate political actor. Moscow has been heavily criticized for engaging with Hamas, especially after October 7, however the recent developments have shown that this approach is rational and fruitful.
The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs assessed the “good will gesture” by Hamas leaders pertaining to the release of a Russian hostage in a very positive way. It was announced by Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s official representative, on November 27, who said: “We would like to draw your attention to the fact that our compatriot was given the opportunity to return home without being bound by the fulfillment of the conditions agreed upon through the mediation of Qatar between Israel and Hamas for the exchange of some of the women and children hostages in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons.” Zakharova confirmed that this humanitarian outcome happened solely thanks to Russian diplomacy without Qatar’s mediation. Moscow in any case notified Tel Aviv about such an operation and signaled its readiness to pursue similar work in the future.
Diplomacy today is an incredibly complex business. Far from consisting in relations, agreements and dialogue between nation-states solely, it increasingly involves dealing with non-state or quasi-state actors as well as others whose status might be ambiguous or disputed such as de facto governments, rebel groups, unrecognized or partly-recognized states, and so on. In addition, religious institutions plus non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the Red Cross play a very important role in mediating conflicts.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has taken, echoing many other voices, the stance that the so-called “two-state” formula, approved by the UN Security Council, would be a viable solution for the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So far Israeli-Russian pragmatic good relations have endured. It remains to be seen how the escalation in Gaza will affect this complex relationship.
Uriel Araujo is a journalist, researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.
