>Can someone here please explain to me how this places Putin against Trump? Trump has said he wanted to do this all along.
Nothing to do with Trump. It’s a move by Moscow to work towards cooperation with Israel, though I don’t understand the timing.
Because this is Passover. The timing is a grand gesture. I think Putin’s learning a sense of theatre from Trump!
As for why, I think in many ways Russia is trying to extricate itself from some of its questionable ME alliances of convenience. Assad, for example: just before the US bombing, Russia said it was not inflexible in maintaining Assad and would be open to discussing a way of replacing him (a good idea, in my opinion, because he has become such a point of conflict and a recruiting tool for the Islamists). So I think the Russians were also finding him a bit of an embarrassment.
And last but not least, their own Muslims are heating up again. The St Petersburg attack was carried out by a person from Kyrgyzstan and may have been coordinated from somewhere in that region, and the one person apprehended in the Stockholm attack was Chechen. So sucking up to the Muslims hasn’t helped very much.
In the past 30 years, nearly 2.7 million Russians of Jewish decent moved to Israel.