One conflict can hide another. The war that has just broken out between Israel and Hamas, with the risk it poses of the region going up in flames, has pushed another war off the media radar, the one Russia has been waging in Ukraine for the last 20 months. Yet the two crises are linked by the players who stand to benefit from them. Foremost among them: Vladimir Putin.

The most obvious reason why this new explosion in the Middle East comes at the right time for the Russian president is that Ukraine's allies are turning fearfully south and Russia is relaunching its offensive in the Donbas.

In recent days, Russian forces have been relentlessly shelling the area around Avdiivka, a town of 30,000, now numbering less than 2,000 as it has suffered greatly in the attempts to dislodge the Ukrainian defenders. Since 2022, everyone in Europe knows the names of Mariupol and Bakhmut. But who has heard of Avdiivka?

The battle rages on. "The enemy is suffering significant losses," reported Ukrainian General Oleksandr Syrsky on Monday, October 23, but it is "constantly replenishing his forces with reserve troops, notably brought in from Russia." He doesn't mention Ukrainian losses, but it's not difficult to imagine them.

On Saturday, October 21, a Russian missile killed six civilians at a postal sorting center in Kharkiv. Radio silence. From the outset, Putin has been betting that Western public opinion would eventually tire of the war in Ukraine. He could not have wished for anything better than a new level of horror in the Middle East.

There are other, less immediate reasons why this crisis benefits the Russian president. He invaded Ukraine in the name of an imperial design: the conquest of a nation whose existence as a country he denies. Operations on the ground did not go as planned; the "nation that didn't exist" resisted, supported by Western democracies.

On the diplomatic front, on the other hand, Russia has been met with less resistance. The war has highlighted a rift between these democracies, which are convinced that they are defending international law with support for Ukraine, and some governments in the rest of the world which see it only as a European conflict and further proof of Western hypocrisy based on double standards. The spontaneous solidarity of Western countries with Israel after the massacres of October 7 aggravated this divide, especially when the Israeli army set up the blockade of Gaza, ordered the evacuation of its population from the north to the south and began bombing the territory.

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