Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will leave for Moscow on Thursday for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. On Sunday, Putin and Netanyahu discussed military cooperation issues over the phone, according to the Kremlin press service. The Kremlin stressed that the conversation had been initiated by Israel.
The press service said the two parties “discussed pressing bilateral issues, including military contacts, and the situation in the Middle East region.”
Netanyahu’s visit takes place days before the Israeli elections and against the backdrop of reports of an attack attributed to Israel on military installations in the Aleppo area in Syria last week.
This is also the first meeting between Putin and Netanyahu since President Trump recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. The recognition drew harsh criticism from Russia and senior officials in the Putin administration declared they would never accept it.
A Russian diplomatic source told the semi-official news agency RIA Novosti that both sides have recently been working on concretizing the understandings reached regarding foreign military presence in Syria in 2015. According to the same source, Israel and Russia are now working to transfer those understandings to written documents.
Putin and Netanyahu last held talks in Moscow on February 27. The Russian leader said after those negotiations that a working group on Syria involving Russia, Israel and other countries could deal with the normalization of the situation in the country “after terrorism in Syria had been fully vanquished.”
That could be a very long time from now.
For his part, Netanyahu said on March 3 that his talks with Putin had reached an agreement on coordinating efforts by their respective armies and achieving the common goal of the withdrawal of foreign troops from Syria.