As the world continues to watch the Ukrainian crisis unfold, Israeli diplomat and spokesperson for the Consulate General of Israel in New York Itay Milner paid a visit to Syracuse University and WAER. Just about every country around the globe has condemned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, and that includes Israel.
But Milner told WAER's Scott Willis that the middle eastern country has a complicated history and relationship with Russia, finds itself in an awkward balancing act as it supports Ukraine.
Editor's note: This transcript is an abbreviated version of the interview. You can listen to the entire interview above.
ITAY MILNER: We can all acknowledge that this is a huge tragedy to everyone, especially to the people of Ukraine when it comes to, you know, being on the right side of history. It's very clear. Where is the right side of history and Israel takes a very strong stance. It condemned Russia in the UN and as the spokesperson, I personally condemn Russia on the invasion.
When it comes to strategic Alliance, our first strategic Alliance is with the U.S., but there's also another side to the story. Israel is a country that is situated in a very challenging region in the world. We have neighbors to our north like Syria and Lebanon that are very chaotic. There are actors there that are bad actors in every standard that you check. They're also good actors there. The one actor that is there and it's the strongest actor is the Russians.
They pretty much control. They have a military presence there. So whenever Israel does to protect itself to defend itself, and also defends other countries in the region, it has to do so in having an understanding with the Russians. Now, obviously it puts us in a very challenging situation. You know, we understand where we're supposed to be right now. We send humanitarian aid to Ukraine. We just built a field hospital in Ukraine. The Israeli government announced that it will receive not only Jewish refugees, but also non-Jew refugees...Ukrainians.
And we condemn Russia. But we doing all of that in a way that we also keep our relations with Russia. Just last Saturday, prime minister Bennett, the prime minister of Israel, flew to Moscow and he met with president Putin. He is the first Western country leader to meet with Putin since this whole crisis started. So I think it's very important that we maintain this relations with Russia because we can all benefit from it.
SCOTT WILLIS: Do we know how every day Israelis feel about the conflict?
ITAY MILNER: So that's a very interesting question cause I'm not sure many people or many of the listeners are aware that out of 9 million citizens in Israel, a million were born in the former Soviet Union. That's a crazy number. That's more than 10% of the population. Many of them have kids and families. That's almost 20% of the population that identify themselves as former Soviet Union. Many, many of them still have families in Ukraine and in Russia. There are still many Jews living in Ukraine and in Russia and Ukraine itself, there are more than 50,000 Jews. 200,000 Ukrainians are eligible to immigrate to Israel by the right of return.
In Russia, It's even more, it's almost half a million, mainly the former Soviet union population. They are extremely pro-Ukrainian in this situation, even if they came from, from areas that were Russia and they have families in Russia, they still support Ukraine. So we had many protests in Israel, many rallies outside the Russian embassy, outside the Ukrainian embassy. And it's a very hot topic. I think, by now we can say that this is a public opinion conflict more than any conflict that we've seen in the last few decades or at all in history.
