Daniel Meierlecturer at Sciences Po Grenoble, associate researcher at UMR Pacte

Since mid-March, the Ukrainian crisis has continued to reveal the underlying dynamics running through the Middle East, such as the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States. The Saudi kingdom, in disgrace since the White House-authorized publication of a CIA report making MBS the main instigator of the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in his country's consulate in Istanbul in 2018, could decide, like Kuwait, to no longer peg the Saudi rial to the dollar alone but to "mix" its basket of currencies to which it would be committed, including the yuan as the currency of payment for its oil exports.

Revealed on Tuesday March 15 by the Wall Street Journal, this new dig at relations with the United States promises to give Joe Biden pause for thought, as he is currently facing inflation of 8% (February 2022) due to high oil prices (US$140/barrel). All the more so since Russia demanded on March 23 that from now on all payments for its gas be made in rubles rather than dollars or euros. This retaliatory measure, clearly aimed at European countries, follows a new trend in Europe towards sourcing gas from Qatar. It also serves to challenge the dollar's supremacy in the energy sector.

For his On March 15, the Foreign Minister of the United Arab Emirates visited Moscow to discuss a range of Middle Eastern issues, as well as as well as improving global energy security. Abu Dhabi said it was committed to respecting an agreement agreement between OPEC+ members to stabilize production, as reiterated at the at the Atlantic Council Forum in Dubai on March 28, citing the need to separate the need to separate oil production from political issues, as well as the impossibility but also by the impossibility of replacing Russian production (10mio b/d) at a moment's notice. Mohamed Bin Salman, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia delivered a similar message to the Japanese Prime Minister the day before, while Bahrain's King Hamad bin al-Khalifa spoke with Vladimir Putin by telephone the importance of finding a diplomatic solution to the conflict. conflict.

Meanwhile, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu visited Moscow and Kiev on March 16-17 in a bid to give substance to the Turkish good offices initiated by President Erdogan at the start of the conflict, and to call for a cessation of hostilities, particularly in view of the presence of 80 Turkish nationals trapped in the city of Marioupol, then under siege; most of whom were able to be evacuated thanks to a Turkish safe-conduct negotiated with Russia on March 17.

Iraq is also closely monitoring the fate of the 5,500 Iraqis, 223 of whom were admitted to Poland at the beginning of March, paving the way for further coordination, notably with Romania, to facilitate the entry and stay of Iraqis from the Ukraine. For its part, Iran has just announced the relocation of its embassy from Kiev to Chisinau in Moldavia, while its unpreparedness to come to the aid of the thousands of Iranian students trapped by the war is being debated within society.

As for the Palestinians, they are much more divided on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict: according to a recent poll, 43% believe that Russia is responsible for the conflict, while 40% think that the blame lies with Ukraine. In Syria's Idlib pocket, a recent demonstration in support of Ukraine confirmed an anti-Russian stance that had already been made clear when Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, called an apostate by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), responded positively to Vladimir Putin's call to enlist Chechen fighters alongside Russian troops in Ukraine.

For their part, Islamic State fighters seem intent on taking advantage of the conflict in Ukraine to step up their operations against the Syrian army, Iranian auxiliaries and Russian troops present in Syria, even though the latter have not seen a reduction in their presence on Syrian soil. On the other hand, the recruitment of Syrian volunteers ready to join the Russian army in Ukraine seems to have had little success: according to Franck MacKenzie, Commander of the U.S. Army Central Command (CENTCOM) in the Middle East, only a few men have been brought from Syria to Ukraine, apparently a far cry from the 16,000 combatants.

Far from automatic solidarity, Israel's position on the conflict took a new turn following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's public address to the Knesset. During this 18-minute meeting, he used Holocaust terminology, drawing a dangerous parallel between the fate of the Jews during the Second World War and that of Ukrainians facing the Russians today. In so doing, he incurred the wrath of most Israeli political leaders, creating the opposite effect to that intended. This intervention does not seem likely to help revise Israel's posture, which is marked by a limitation on the number of Ukrainian refugees who can be welcomed in Israel and a reluctance to take clear sanctions against Russia. On this last point, Israel is the target of criticism from the European Union, which would like to see the Hebrew state comply with the package of sanctions it has adopted against Moscow.

South of the Mediterranean, the impact of the conflict is severe, as demonstrated by the extremely worrying situation in Egypt, where the government has decided to increase subsidies to farmers in order to support local wheat production, which should ideally meet 70% of national needs. In addition, the process ofsetting up a nuclear power plant by the Russian state-owned company Rosatom in Dabaa, on the shores of the Red Sea, could be delayed by the conflict and by the Egyptian diplomatic position condemning the Russian military invasion at the General Assembly vote on March 2, 2022. Grain shortages are also affecting Tunisia, which is seeing prices soar without being able to afford any more debt, after Covid-19. At the same time, the authorities can scarcely imagine allowing the price of bread and flour to rise, on pain of a social explosion.

All in all, the conflict in Ukraine, which is moving towards a new phase with the concentration of Russian military action in the east of the country, has revealed the deep crisis that exists between the Gulf monarchies and the United States. What's more, it showed that the petro-monarchies are looking elsewhere, towards China but also towards Israel, as the meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh on March 22 demonstrated. In the company of Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohamed ben Zayed al-Nahyan discussed the global repercussions of the crisis, particularly in the fields of energy, markets and food security.