Israel is not neutral in Ukraine. Pretending otherwise now is either naivete or evasion. Ukraine is where the Russia-Iran drone model is being tested, refined, and scaled under battlefield conditions. Ukraine is where Russia launched more than 54,000 suicide drones -intentionally targeting civilians- just in 2025. That makes the war directly relevant to Jerusalem. This is no longer a distant European conflict. It is the rehearsal ground for the kind of attritional, drone-saturated warfare Israel and its regional partners already face.

During this conflict, Ukraine has assembled one of the world’s most extensive combat archives on drone warfare and it is now sharing battlefield data with allies to accelerate autonomous systems and drone-artificial-intelligence development. This is not general geostrategic “interactions”. It is battlefield knowledge with immediate operational value.

For years, Israeli caution toward Russia had a simple logic: Syria. Jerusalem wanted to preserve freedom of action against Iranian targets and avoid unnecessary friction with Moscow. That logic weakened sharply after Bashar al-Assad’s overthrow in December 2024 and the rise of Ahmad al-Sharaa as Syria’s de facto ruler.

Geopolitically, Russia still retains interests in the Levant, but one of the central arguments........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)