MOSCOW, October 10. /TASS/. The root causes of the escalation between Palestine and Israel lie in the failure to implement a two-state solution, Palestinian envoy to Moscow says; the Kiev regime is worried that the 18-month firehose of Western military aid may now potentially shrink to a trickle; and the Central Bank of Russia is setting the regulatory framework for giving foreign banks access to the digital ruble. These stories topped Tuesday’s newspaper headlines across Russia.

 

Izvestia: What sparked Gaza fight and where Israeli-Palestinian conflict goes from here

The root cause of the escalation around the Gaza Strip is Washington’s unwillingness to settle the conflict via the creation of two states, Palestinian Ambassador to Moscow Abdel Hafiz Nofal told Izvestia. That said, Israel believes that ending the war means that it must eliminate Hamas as a military and political entity. The sides have continued to exchange missile strikes for three days in a row. According to the US media, Israel is now preparing to launch a ground operation.

Political scientist Vyacheslav Matuzov also contends that one of the key causes of the current situation in the Middle East is the US’ attempts to undo the work accomplished by the "quartet," the negotiation format launched in 2002 which includes the US, Russia, the UN and EU, and to alter the agenda to suit its own views.

"The Americans took everything under their control while Russia was distracted by Syria, Central Asia and domestic issues. The US unilaterally developed its own plan, which it agreed only with Israel while informing neither the Arab countries, nor Palestine, nor the "quartet" about its intentions. The plan was dubbed "the deal of the century" without disclosing its contents. It was possible to deduce from some fragmentary statements that the plan involved relocating all Arabs from the West Bank to the East Bank and building a purely Jewish state," Matuzov said.

According to the political scientist, this plan was "horrifying" even for US experts on the Middle East because it did not take into account the real interests of the Arab population.

"All of this, especially given the series of revolutions in the Middle East masterminded by the West, led to the creation of an unstable situation for Israel in the Middle East," the expert thinks.

Benny Briskin, former aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Izvestia that neither him, nor anybody else sees any means of settling the situation. In his opinion, it cannot be settled until Hamas is destroyed, not as an idea but as an organization and a military force. The expert said that, today, there is an absolute consensus across Israel that there is no use in holding talks and negotiations because that path has failed and Israel is now paying the price.

That said, Briskin admits that the failure by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to react in the first hours of the conflict to Hamas’ infiltration of Israeli border areas marked a clear fiasco for Israel as a whole. According to him, it is abundantly clear that this represented a colossal intelligence and operational breakdown in which the IDF failed to dispatch special units to protect civilians who were under attack. The expert stated that, for the first time in Israel’s history, civilians effectively found themselves at the frontline.

 

Nezavisimaya Gazeta: Kiev worries lest Western military aid firehose may shrink to trickle

Addressing the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky tried to draw parallels between Hamas’ latest attacks on Israel and Russia’s actions in the Ukrainian conflict. The Kiev regime is clearly alarmed that, due to the escalation in Israel, the Ukrainian conflict may now take a back seat for the US and EU, which would impact the future flow of the military aid that is keeping Kiev in the fight. Grounds for such concern are more than abundant and, in the future, the West’s support for Ukraine may well diminish, although it will not disappear altogether, experts told Nezavisimaya Gazeta. They also stress that the current escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict confirms the risks of relying on US mediation, and that the Kiev regime should draw its own conclusions from the unfolding situation.

Such statements by the Ukrainian leader show how little he actually knows about the ins-and-outs of major league politics, political scientist Yelena Suponina told the newspaper. She added that the current situation in the Middle East is quite dangerous and such irresponsible claims as Zelensky’s only add fuel to the fire as well as create more difficulties for Israel, for which Zelensky has such pronounced sympathy. That said, Russia, serving as a mediator in this conflict, is displaying a more restrained and objective stance. "Over recent years, US representatives have been giving much less attention to the Middle Eastern region than before. As US diplomats told me, they haven’t been spending as much effort on the Middle East as, say, ten years ago. Yet now Washington will have to resume giving its attention [to the region]. And because the resources are not limitless, this has to be done at the expense of other regions. So it won’t be possible to exclusively emphasize Ukraine anymore," Suponina said. However, one cannot count on a complete suspension of American aid to Kiev. Yet, Washington’s support will begin to decrease and the US will be forced to seek a viable exit ramp from the Ukrainian conflict.

That said, former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavel Klimkin drew his own conclusions from the latest events in Israel. In his view, the escalation of the conflict there with attacks by Hamas and the shelling of civilians confirmed the ultimate ineffectiveness of the Israeli security model based on a system of external guarantees. One of the lessons of this situation is already obvious. Israel’s security model, which was put in place in lieu of NATO membership, is not suitable for Kiev. Commenting in a social media post, Klimkin wrote that Ukraine should use this argument in its dialogue with its NATO allies, above all with the Americans.

 

RBC: Central Bank of Russia proposes giving foreign banks access to digital ruble in 2025

The Central Bank of Russia has begun to prepare a normative base for connecting foreign banks to the digital ruble beginning in 2025. Plans call for making the new type of currency accessible to a wide circle of users approximately around that time. The banking regulator has published a draft guideline, under which changes in banks’ accounting plans will be introduced and a special account created for foreign lenders’ holdings of digital rubles. This part of the guideline takes effect on January 1, 2025.

Foreign banks may join the digital ruble platform in order to conduct international transactions, thus bypassing the SWIFT international payment system (from which Russian banks have been disconnected due to sanctions), Yaroslav Shitsle, an attorney at Rustam Kurmayev and Partners, said. "It could be any bank that is ready to conclude an agreement with the Central Bank of Russia. Having its own digital currency is not necessary. The only issue is the economic practicality," he said.

According to Yekaterina Semerikova at the Skolkovo School of Management, the key goal of engaging foreign banks in digital ruble-based transactions is to ease doing business with Russian companies. "A digital ruble account will help in conducting transactions that are currently hindered due to the sanctions regimes. Moreover, it could also be useful for those who wish to work with Russian clients because currently there is a limited selection of solutions for those who want to retain international partnerships," the expert said.

 

Kommersant: Reduction in Israeli gas output may impact LNG deliveries to EU

Israel has decided to temporarily suspend gas extraction at one of its largest gas fields, Tamar, located on the Mediterranean sea shelf not far from the Gaza Strip and within range of Hamas’ missiles. Domestic consumers will continue to receive gas from the Leviathan gas field, the largest in Israel. Suspending production at the Tamar field, which was exporting gas to Egypt, among other customers, may result in a lesser load on Egyptian LNG plants, thus reducing LNG deliveries to Europe in winter.

Sergey Kondratyev from the Institute of Energy and Finance Foundation notes that Tamar was not providing significant gas supplies to Egypt, as the Leviathan field is a far more substantial exporter and, thus, its reorientation toward serving the domestic market will create problems.

Suspending gas extraction at Tamar, if it leads to reduced exports, will more seriously affect Jordan and, to a lesser extent, Egypt, which may adjust its LNG export plans for 4Q by 30-45%. This may in turn affect supplies to the European market in winter to a certain degree.

 

Vedomosti: Nobel Prize in Economics awarded to Harvard researcher in gender inequality

The Nobel Committee has awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to Claudia Goldin, a professor at Harvard. She received the award "for having advanced our understanding of women's labour market outcomes."

Alexander Safonov, vice rector of the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, thinks that the committee’s choice in 2023 was largely driven by the prevailing socio-political agenda in the Western world. The Nobel Committee opted to focus on gender-related economic issues because economists are only now beginning to do serious research on the more pertinent economic issues of recent years stemming from the coronavirus pandemic and the global energy crisis, and thus cutting-edge research on these topics may be eligible for awards only after several years, added Igor Polyakov of the Center of Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting.

Lyudmila Ivanova-Shvets, associate professor at the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, noted that a serious transformation is currently underway in the global economy, and thus the Nobel Committee opted to laud research work focused on "the most neutral" subject.

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