Tit for Tat for Washington’s Sponsorship of Abbas’ Fatah

As the Russian navy holds its first war game in the Mediterranean this week, led by the Admiral Kuznetsov carrier with 47 Su-33 warplanes and 10 helicopters on its decks, and the Moskva missile cruiser, Moscow prepares to settle a small account with Washington. (See HOT POINTS)

DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Moscow sources report a Kremlin decision to take under its wing the Palestinian Islamist fundamentalist Hamas government of the Gaza Strip and its prime minister, Ismail Haniya, to counteract the Bush Administration’s sponsorship of the rival Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad in Ramallah.

President Vladimir Putin has a bone to pick with US president George W. Bush.

He felt snubbed by not being invited to co-sponsor the Middle East conference in Annapolis last November, after exerting his best efforts to persuading Syrian president Bashar Assad to send a delegate to the event.

In fact the US President brushed off Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov’s request for a seat at the top table.

The Russians next tried spreading the word that Washington had agreed to Moscow hosting Annapolis II in March, as the follow-up of the Israel-Palestinian track and opener of Israel-Syrian negotiations. But so far, no okay has been received from Washington.

According to our Washington sources, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in favor of the plan and promised Lavrov to promote it. But she ran into a wall set up by the National Security Council and Israel’s adamant objections to the Russian initiative. So the plan never got as far as the Oval Office.

Despite this setback to its Middle East plans, the Russian decision of Dec. 17, to start shipping nuclear fuel to Iran’s nuclear reactor in Bushehr was coordinated with Washington. Moscow was also co-opted to the process of US-Iranian rapprochement signaled by the release of the US National Intelligence Agency’s Dec. 3 report which absolved Iran of developing nuclear weapons after 2003.

Moscow tried presenting these episodes as a helping hand to get Iran to climb down on uranium enrichment without loss of face and Washington to come to terms with Tehran. The Russians had hoped that their help would elicit America’s consent to cut them into US moves on Middle East peacemaking.

This did not happen. DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Moscow sources report that Putin accordingly embarked on his diplomatic initiative.

Working through the Russian embassy in Damascus, the Kremlin has invited a Hamas delegation headed by its exiled leader Khaled Meshaal and prime minister Ismail Haniya for an early visit to Moscow.

As a lure, the Russians are offering to use their influence to obtain recognition of the Hamas government from the Muslim Republics of the Caucasian and Central Asia.

This, they say, would give Hamas valuable international points to offset US-European patronage of the rival Palestinian establishment on the West Bank.

This decision prompted Israeli foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to fly to Moscow Wednesday, Jan. 16, and intercede with the Kremlin against this step.